Most Indians are still not purchasing online: Bimal Kartheek Rebba, trell

Social Commerce, which is a $1.5 billion to $2 billion GMV market in India today, is expected to be worth $16 billion to $20 billion in just five years, as per industry reports. In his keynote address at the 5^th edition of MOBEXX 2021, held yesterday (November 30, 2021), Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Co-founder and COO, trell, highlighted the growth of social commerce and why it is important for brands to participate in social commerce as a journey and how consumers are increasingly adopting it as a go-to platform for anything related to lifestyle.

Speaking on the topic, ‘Future-proofing your social commerce strategy’, Rebba noted that social commerce is at an inflexion point today and stressed that brands today have to future-proof themselves by involving themselves in social commerce.

Why social commerce is important

Rebba pointed out that a decade back when e-commerce was being introduced to the ecosystem, most of, what he called, ‘India 1’, who were trying to engage with e-commerce platforms had trust issues and those trust issues in E-commerce 1.0 were addressed by innovation in payment infrastructure such as cash on delivery or innovation in supply-chain, ensuring that the delivery happened within 2-3 days. A lot of investments were made into these two infrastructures to enable the trust for India 1.

“But since we are talking about a growth trajectory for people purchasing online, most Indians are still not purchasing online. In fact, two out of three Indians who are online today do not transact. There is one more layer of trust that we all have to work together for, which is about finding the right products,” he added.

According to Rebba, after payments and logistics, the next kind of trust infrastructure that brands and platforms need to develop is to enable people to discover products in the language that they understand. “That is one of the key levers that will determine the success of social commerce going forward,” he maintained.

Who are we addressing?

Rebba further said, “Since we are talking about the growth trajectory, some of the key things that we have to understand is that most of the innovations that we have done today have invited the first 100 million consumers online to purchase and the first set of the journey is done.”

In the second co-part of this growth journey, the industry has to address the “India 2 co-part”. Elaborating on this group, Rebba described them as people who have a disposable income of $1,400-$2,500, who consume most of the content in the language that they speak and understand – the vernacular audiences – and most importantly, their size is almost 3x to 3.1x the India 1 audiences that are already shopping online today.

To give an idea of how large this audience is, Rebba said that today there are 110 million shoppers that are currently buying products online. “But think about the users that we all are missing as we have still not built platforms that are accessible to them. If you look at it, in totality there are 734 million Internet users and close to 450 million of them are actively using social media on a day to day basis, 500 million of them are consuming video content online and 536 million of them are consuming content in their own language. Thus, the audience that we are missing is almost 5x-7x of the audience that is transacting online today,” Rebba informed.

This is an edited excerpt. For the complete keynote address by Bimal Kartheek Rebba, watch below: