With the ease in lockdown 4.0, guidelines for online delivery of goods have been relaxed and e-commerce websites such as Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, and many others are starting to recover and some of them have reached their sales to nearly the pre COVID period.
India’s e-commerce sector is recovering with the ease in lockdown restrictions for online delivery of all goods of all kinds. In the earlier period of lockdown e-commerce sites could only sell essential products. The order has reached to 70% as that of the pre COVID period and rising to its previous glory.
Kapil Makhija CEO of Unicommerce said that “Since the ease of restrictions on lockdown 4.0, consumers have been ordering goods other than essentials. But consumers are purchasing only specific products based on their requirements. Products such as trimmers, chargers, home decor items, kid’s clothing, etc. are some of the products which have been increasingly ordered”.
There is also a sudden increase in electrical items such as laptops, mobile phones, trimmers, USB cables, headphones, etc. since most of the consumers who are still employed are working from home and college students have taken to online means of education. There has also been an increase in demand for coolers and Air conditioners with the rising temperature across India.
This growth in volumes of purchases indicates that the e-commerce companies are out of the COVID blues in business and are seeing more and more increase in demand of goods irrespective of the pandemic situation in the country.
Arnav Gupta an Analyst at Forrester said that “This online buying will continue to happen even if the COVID cases increase in India, consumers will purchase goods including the non-essential goods as consumers have grown accustomed to the situation. People have made homes their offices, classrooms, and gym. Non-essential products anyway don’t have a continuous demand as of now like essential goods such as grocery and sanitary items. So there will be a sudden decline in its purchase now and then, and then it will normalize whether the COVID-19 cases increase or not”.