2014 may turn out to be one of the most important years for Indian E-Commerce sector. In first 5 months alone, we have already seen a lot of activity including a big marriage and couple of huge investment rounds. And in coming weeks and month we are sure to see more!
Given that there is a lot of interest amongst people, we decided to find out the current pecking order of ecommerce players in terms of traffic and sources from which they generate their traffic. Lets look at it in more detail:
We looked at 10 Indian e-commerce sites based on the monthly traffic they generate. We used Similarweb to find out the numbers for comparison. Here is the estimated monthly traffic of each of the Top 10 players. [Stats have been taken for month of April 2014]
Expectedly, Flipkart topped the charts with over 62 million visits in the month of April with Myntra coming shade lower at 59.5 million. Given that both of them have now come together, purely based on the traffic, they clock more traffic than the rest 8 players combined.
While we expected either Amazon or Snapdeal to grab the 3rd place in terms of traffic, Jabong took the bronze position with 42.5 mln visitors followed by Snapdeal (31.4 mln).
Amazon.in clocked a respectable 27.6 million visits in month of April (Remember, they have not even completed a year since launch as yet). Also, if you combine Junglee, which is owned by Amazon, their traffic bulges to close to 40 mln visits.
Interestingly, Infibeam and Tradus both have not been doing too well in terms of traffic. They clocked 3.4 mln & 3 mln respectively. Also, according to Similarweb, their traffic has been steadily dropping over last 6 months. Both of them had close to 5 million visits at the start of the year!
When it came to user engagement, Flipkart again reigned supreme with each visitor spending an average of 8:35 minutes per visit. Ebay also had very high levels of engagement with 8:15 mins followed by Snapdeal (7:49 mins).
Myntra had surprisingly low (infact lowest of all) visitor time spent at 3:04 minutes. Junglee and Jabong were other two sites who had low visitor time spent.
Given that Flipkart had highest time spent by visitors, they also got the maximum pageviews per visitor (8.53) followed by Ebay (8.04). Surprisingly, Tradus did quite well in terms of pageviews with a average of 7.57 views per visit!
Source Of Traffic
Look at the source of traffic offers some interesting insights into how these ecommerce sites generate traffic and from where! For example, if a site has lower search traffic, but higher direct traffic, it means they have created a brand, which people remember and directly visit the site url for any needs. On the other hand if the search traffic is high, it means people are either unaware of them or don’t prefer to go their directly.
Let us look at how various sites generate their traffic!
Myntra, Tradus, Flipkart and Jabong were 4 sites that had lower search traffic and high direct traffic, which meant that they had better brand recall than others (there can be other reasons as well) and more people visited these sites directly.
On the other hand, HomeShop18 and Infibeam had nearly 6 out of 10 visitors coming from search engines.
When it came to referral traffic (through affiliate partners, coupon sites, etc) Myntra rules with 42% of their traffic coming from referrals. Snapdeal, HS18 and Junglee had lower referral traffic.
Contrary to popular belief most sites had very less paid traffic (from advertising). Junglee, Jabong & Myntra got around 6% of traffic from display advertising. All others had between 0-2 percent.
You can check out full Infographic embedded below