Today, Indian customer are being dynamic in 21st
century and are choosing various ways for their purchases. At same time major
segment of Indian consumers believe in touch and check before they buy. They
become more cautious when they buy highly priced commodity like jewellery but
in past few years, they showed their appetite towards these category.
Online Jewellery Market
Size and Growth
According to Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the total number of visits for
jewellery product was 3.76M and growth percentage in it is better than any
other category. In March 2013, India’s jewellery market size is worth around
RS. 251,000 Cr. Market percentage of online jewellery shopping is less than 1%
around 1200 Cr. By 2018, companies are expecting a market size would be double
in which, online jewellery shopping share would be 2-3% due to government
policy and attraction of investment in the industry. Imitation jewellery market
has a significant role in numbers. In 2013, it marked at 8000Cr and expected to
grow to 15000Cr in coming 2-3 years.
Major Player in
Industry
In jewellery industry, most of the customers make purchase
after they touch and check. Companies are attracted to online selling because
of less operation cost. Jewelers from SMB use big eCommerce player such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Ebay
etc. for sale. Apart from this, major players like Juvailia&you, BlueStone, CaratLane, Voylla,
GeraldOnline (UK based) etc. are setting up their legs in the market.
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Venture Capital
·
Chennai based online jewellery retailer Caratlane had raised total
of $27 million from Tiger Global in three rounds. The US based VC firm pumped
$15 million in Series C, earlier Tiger Global invested $12 million in two
series.
·
Bangalore based online jewellery store Bluestone secured $5
million funding from Accel Partners and Meena Ganesh, CEO&MD of Pearson
Education Services.
·
Designer jewellery and accessories online store, Voylla.com raised
INR 2.5 crores from Pune-based Snow Leopard Technology Ventures.
·
Gurgaon based Youshine, had raised $1.5 million in two rounds of
angel funding in February and November 2012 from two angel investors based out
of Switzerland.
Customers
In India, purchasing jewellery is occasional and
most of the time it takes place during weddings. Buying gold on Festival such
as Dhateras is considered auspicious. The large segment of customer uses domestic
local trusted shop. In tier-1 cities, people choose online shopping where
jewellers companies renders detailed and trusted process with jewellery
certification. In tier-2 and tier-3 cities, people prefer to touch and check method before buying rather
than go online.
Challenges
In jewellery market, the biggest challenge is to
adapt government policies in imports of raw material. A Bombay based company’s
sale led down by 24% due change in government policies. At online platform,
Indian customers are very cautious while buying with big amount. In this case,
trust major issue. Companies are adapting the dynamic process to reach customer
where they provide customer care services and make 2-3 round of communication
before making deal to take place. Other one challenge is to maintain their
brand image and prevent customer to interact with fraud. The imitation
jewellery is approximate 2% in India which generally motivated by Bollywood and
daily soap opera.
Expert’s
views
Overall,
companies are looking positive for online market growth. Success behind this growth is rendered due to
making business customer oriented. Anupam Mittal, an internet entrepreneur says
"These companies solve a pressing
problem and the market is large enough to seed several successful companies."
Gaurav Kushwaha, co-founder of Bengaluru-based BlueStone, says "Pricing and discounts aren't drivers of jewellery sales online, we have
spent years detailing features, improving the display and design of products we
sell online’’." Gitanjali’s chairman Mehul Choksi says “Indian consumers prefer to touch and feel
the jewellery before buying, but the change in consumer behaviour will happen
quite fast, We have tied up with all the major online platforms and we are
always looking for more tie-ups.
India
has the third largest base of internet users in the world numbered to 243.1M
but it is far behind in online purchase. In 2014, google stated that India has
35M online shoppers, less than 15% of all internet users. In 2013, Indian
online retail market was $12.3 billion, while at the same time, the online
jewellery market was $200M. In India,
most of jewellery shoppers are women and out of the total women population 8.4%
are online and this figure poised to grow significantly in coming years. Indian
jewellery market is women centric and its witness real growth.
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