Tech & Retail Trends of 2015

Tech enabled startups that offered services right from booking a cab to ordering food got a strong foothold in the ecommerce industry in 2015. On the other hand, online retail continued to grab headlines. Here’s a recap.

Tech Trends in 2015

This ET report listed down the top tech trends of 2015. They were:

• Established and new online grocery players like BigBasket, Grofers, Peppertap as well as food ordering platforms like Zomato got popular with each passing month

• Feature-rich premium smartphones under Rs. 10000 were made available to buyers, that lead to rise in smartphone users and subsequent growth of m-commerce

• Competition between taxi aggregators Uber, Ola, Taxi for Sure, and Meru intensified. This service industry witnessed huge growth thanks to aggressive marketing by all the players

• Fitness devices and apps such as Mi Band, Fitbit, and Jawbone made their presence felt

• Drones kept people engaged

• Digitals wallets gained more acceptance

Retail Giants were compelled to join ecommerce

The divide between offline and online players narrowed down a little, as many supermarkets crossed the bridge and entered the ecommerce space.

“Year 2015 was a year of challenges and opportunities. Biggest challenge for retailers was unavailability of good retail space due to fall in number of new malls. E-commerce was also a big opportunity. Most retailers either began selling their product themselves or through a tie-up with e-commerce players,” said Kumar Rajagopalan, CEO of Retailers Association of India (RAI).

Some of the examples are:

• Retail giant Shoppers Stop partnered with Snapdeal

• Lifestyle and Spencer entered online retail

• Mahindra Retail acquired BabyOye and rebranded its offline retail brand Mom & Me

• Aditya Birla Group launched its e-commerce portal

• More than 60% of traditional retailers developed their e-commerce capabilities

With majority of Indians being omni-channel shoppers, it is quite expected that offline and online retail players will continue to explore all selling platforms. Although, the future of retail industry would depend on final draft of GST Bill, reworked FDI policy and State tax policies, which is expected to come through in 2016.