Retail giants eye rural India, small towns to push growth

Retail giants have drawn up aggressive plans to make inroads into the smaller cities and towns of India and are employing a variety of tools, including ramping up local language coverage. With farm sector seen as a key support to growth against the mayhem triggered by the pandemic, these companies sense an opportunity to increase sales betting on rural and small town India.

“While our overall ticket sizes have gone down, the huge number of new consumers that have come on board from Bharat have made up for that loss. As a result, our sales have doubled compared to pre-Covid,” said a senior executive at one of India’s leading ecommerce companies, who did not wish to be quoted. 

Sample this: Around 65% of Amazon India’s orders currently come from small cities and towns. And more than 50% sellers on the US-headquartered retail giant’s marketplace are from tier-2-and-below markets such as Aligarh in UP, Idukki in Kerala, Angul in Odisha and Rajpipla in Gujarat.

Similarly, during the lockdown till August, Amazon’s rival, Walmart-backed Flipkart onboarded 8,000 sellers, with more than 70% of them coming from smaller towns.