China and USA may be the biggest markets for e-commerce, but ignore India at your own peril - the world’s largest democracy is the fastest growing market for e-commerce.

In this infographic, we at Metisa compared a few of the largest e-commerce sites in India in terms of traffic, engagement metrics, and major customer acquisition and retention channels.
The goal was to compare these players in a transparent, independent, and neutral manner and see what observations could be drawn. This analysis is based on traffic for the month of May 2017.

The traffic data you will see is sourced from a third-party, independent source called SimilarWeb. They combine several sources of data including local internet service providers, monitored devices, web crawlers, and direct measurement sources to come up with estimates of traffic data, time on site, bounce rate, and other metrics.

Some observations

Who are the biggest players?

• The largest players sell a wide variety of products and are not limited to one product category. This trend is consistent with markets like North America and Southeast Asia where the largest players are marketplaces.
• Amazon India and Flipkart are leaders with significantly more page views than other players in India’s e-commerce market, which is consistent with the similar economies of scale that can be observed in the North American and Southeast Asian markets.

Who has the best customer engagement?

• Amazon India and Myntra are leaders in web and mobile web engagement.
• Larger players like Amazon India, Flipkart, Paytm, MakeMyTrip, and Snapdeal tend to attract customers to spend more minutes on site.

How are they acquiring customers?

• Companies usually receive a large proportion of their traffic directly or from search engines.
• Some companies like Flipkart, Jabong, and Koovs make more use of display ads.
• Most sites receive approximately 10% of traffic from referrals.
• Mail accounts for a small proportion of traffic across e-commerce sites in India. This could be an area of opportunity for sites to boost web traffic.
• Widely differing amounts of success with driving traffic from social media.

We hope you have found this infographic useful in understanding more about the India e-commerce landscape! We’d love to chat if you have any feedback or interesting insights to add about e-commerce in India.

If you are interested in seeing how your firm stacks up against other e-commerce businesses, be sure to check out our free e-commerce business analyzer which gives you a custom report that compares engagement and sources of traffic on your site against the e-commerce industry.