Consumers may splurge Rs 25,000 crore in online festive shopping

New Delhi: With e-commerce giants offering heavy discounts, Indian consumers may splurge nearly Rs 25,000 crore in the upcoming festive season, according to a report.

"This is expected to be the busiest festive season for e-commerce companies as Indian consumers are likely to spend up to Rs 25,000 crore as against over Rs 20,000 crore spent in festive season last year," Assocham Secretary General D S Rawat said.

According to a survey on 2,500 working professionals by Assocham, about 60 per cent of the respondents would prefer online shopping over standing for long hours in store aisles, while most of the remaining opted for shopping at physical brick and mortar outlets.

Most respondents said they are planning to splurge on lucrative deals and discounts offered by e-tailers on everything from apparels, appliances, cosmetics, jewellery, perfumes, shoes to electronic items like mobiles, laptop, television, portable media players and others.

Ease of shopping, more delivery options, diverse payment modes and better offers are some of the key factors highlighted by many respondents to shop online in the festive season.

However, industry experts polled in the survey suggested that e-tailers must learn from the past and gear up to counter various challenges related to logistics, influx of visitors and avoid losing customers due to technical issues by taking precautionary measures beforehand like investing in a larger server or cloud hosting service.

The professionals surveyed were in the age group of 25-40 years from sectors like automobile, biotechnology, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), energy, IT, media and entertainment, pharmaceutical, real estate and others.

The poll was conducted across cities including Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow and Mumbai.