ECommerce is booming. And India is where the action is. When stories of “unicorns” (startups with a valuation of more than 1 Bn) are all around us, it helps to take stock of where the industry is at, and where it’s headed.

Here are some statistics from a recent story in the Economic Times on how far the ECommerce industry has come… (I’m skipping valuation and VC money figures, and focusing on customer stats instead)

Pregnancy, Birth & Childhood: Online baby care represents <10% of the $10 Bn market, growing at 17% a year; Currently clocks approx. 2,500 daily shipments across three major players

 

Education & Learning: $100 Bn market and booming; Student population rose 28% to 315 Mn in the last decade; However, lack of significant success stories in this arena

 

Grocery: Of the $500 Bn retail market in India, $290 Bn is grocery; Largest player – BigBasket – processes approx. 20,000 orders a day; 1 Mn people order groceries via apps every day, growing at 30% every month

 

Home Services: About 100 services on offer, with 20,000 daily users across the top 5 metros; $100 Mn market size, but challenging in terms of trained manpower and timely delivery

 

Shopping: Top players are diversified managed marketplaces mostly; Less than 2% of the $500 Bn retail market is online – plenty of room for growth; Hyper competition has resulted in heavy discounting and companies are unable to make profits currently; Top players clock >100k shipments a day to about 25k pincodes across India

 

Furniture & Home Decor: Offers high margins (60-70%) and not very susceptible to discounting; Market is pegged at $32 Bn and posied to grow to $70 Bn by 2020; Less than 1% is currently online; Average ticket size is Rs. 18,000; By 2018, online furniture sales is expected to reach $1 Bn

 

Taxi Booking: $10 Bn market size with brutal competition among two leading, disruptive players; Now expanding into courier and delivery services as well; Approx. 1 Mn users book cabs every day via apps in 100+ cities

 

Eating Out: Food ordering is a $15 Bn a year business, with Zomato now operational in 22 countries; Indian players service upto 10,000 orders daily via their apps with a few key players in fierce competition akin to Taxi aggregators

 

Travel & Entertainment: E-Ticketing is one of the most penetrated with 40% of rail tickets via IRCTC; Hotels and airline tickets are increasingly booked online; Huge opportunity to connect with wallet and other partners to add value

 

Assets, Properties & Cars: Tata Housing sold flats worth Rs. 50 crores online; Property is an overcrowded space, and used cars is a booming opportunity; New car sales still happen mostly through showrooms

 

Wallet & Bill Payment: New licences issued by RBI to 11 banks recently; Market size for mobile wallet is Rs. 350 crores, expected to grow to Rs. 1,200 crores by 2019; PayTM – the largest player – has 100 Mn users with an average wallet size of Rs. 350

 

Refurbished & Used Goods: Market estimated at $15 Bn; Platforms enable about 2 Mn transactions a month with an approx. GMV of $4 Bn

 

Social Networking & Jobs: India has the second-largest user base for almost all key social platforms; At 350 Mn internet users, India still has a long way to go for 100% penetration; Facebook has >110 Mn users in India; LinkedIn has become an alternate to job portals

 

Healthcare: Diagnostics alone is a $15 Bn market, and the overall healthcare opportunity is $100 Bn; Every month 20 Mn users book 20,000+ appointments via apps, but presence remains mostly limited to large cities

 

Insurance & Retirement Planning: Online term products cheaper by almost 35%, but only 2% of the business has gone online; PolicyBazaar sells about 40,000 policies every month

 

Others: Lingerie worth nearly $30 Mn is sold online; Lenskart ships >1,000 spectacles a day; The domestic gems & jewellery market is Rs. 1.2 lakh crore, while the lingerie market is approx. Rs. 4,000 crore, but less than 1% has gone online

Here are some more statistics from Mint…

Power: $68 Bn – GDP loss estimated due to electricity shortage across India

Infrastructure: $10 Bn – Traffic congestion costs per year

Healthcare: 1 doctor per 1,700 people currently

Financial Inclusion: 120 Mn households without a bank account

 

Startup Statistics:

• Approx. 80-85k currently employed’ 3-4 startups born each day
• $4.9 Bn investments made in 2015
• 65+ M&A deals; 110+ incubators/accelerators; 290+ active angels; 155+ active VCs/PEs
• 4,200-4,400 startups currently in India – 3rd highest after US & UK
• $2.5-2.7 Mn is the average valuation of startups of which 13-15% are in ecommerce
• 28 is the average age of startup founders

For some of you, these numbers may prove that the market is already saturated, while others may see an opportunity for growth. Whichever way you look at it, exciting times are afoot!

Note: Source of data – Various industry estimates as reported in Economic Times and Mint.