E-commerce : Emerging Avenues for Entrepreneurs in India

Abstract

E-commerce is the buzz of current commercial transactions and is rapidly growing across the world. According to Report of Digital–Commerce, IAMAI-IMRB (2013), e-commerce industry in India has witnessed a growth of US$ 3.8 billion in the year 2009 to US$ 9.5 billion in 2012. In INDIA, there are about 150 million internet users out of which around 75 million households that are ‘ready’ for E-commerce with around 57 per cent of E-commerce sales comes from small towns. Among these internet users there are under-10 million internet users only who actually buy online. Looking to these, there is an ample scope of future growth of E-commerce in INDIA with estimated potential to grow to a value of USD76 billion by 2021 with approx 180 million broadband users by 2020. Such growth in E-commerce will provide new entrepreneur ship opportunities in the areas of logistics, packaging, and technology. Also, it is estimated service sector will provide entrepreneur opportunities with the potential to earn ~USD 7.5 billion, annually, by 2021. These will open up international markets for the SME sector and can become an important facilitator for the growth of the telecom and domestic air cargo industries. The opportunities has been identified by many foreign ventures and global giants like Amazon, Flipkart, Pay-pal, E-bay etc. and have entered the Indian e-commerce space to take the advantage of first mover but still larger area is unattended and left for future entrepreneurs particularly in small & medium enterprise segment. In the paper author will try to identify such areas of opportunities for Indian Entrepreneur, sustainable practices to be adopted by entrepreneurs, as well as requisite capabilities to tap the opportunities available in the INDIAN E-Commerce market.