Couponing has consistently been one of the most popular means of customer acquisition among retailers and service providers across Europe and North America. However, couponing never had a great role to play in Indian purchasing behavior until recently. With the country’s e-commerce, m-commerce and more recently hyper-local sectors now exploding with activity, couponing has suddenly found attention. This has resulted in the coupon market becoming overcrowded and extremely competitive within a few years.
Huge Growth Rate
In addition to online retailers, companies like Foodpanda, Uber and Ola, with significant budgets for incentivization and customer acquisition have fueled this unprecedented growth. Add to that, the fast growing Indian startup ecosystem and you have an extremely lucrative coupon distribution market with over 150 companies competing. However, since the growth may have been slightly puffed up by the excessive infusion of funds into startups, it will be interesting to see how the competition shapes up once the dust settles.
Mobile
Another important factor for Indian couponing companies to consider is the increase in consumer preference of mobile over desktop for purchasing. While cab services such as Ola and grocery services like Grofers are already available only on mobile, more retailers are considering moving to a mobile-only model. The recent announcement by Flipkart about their plan to become a mobile-only portal may have surprised many, but they have good reasons to make that bet. The fact that mobile surpassed desktop in 2015 for the first time in global sales and especially in India may help understand their decision to some extent.
There is no longer doubt that Mobile is the way forward for online retailers and service providers for reaching customers. With each passing day, more Indian consumers are making purchases from their smartphones. And with the consistent rise in smartphone and internet penetration into India, this behavior is only expected to increase. It will be interesting to see how couponing companies will fit into this trend.
The customer base for coupon and deal aggregators in India is usually price and value sensitive. Take GrabOn for instance, a Hyderabad based coupons portal that within less than 2 years, successfully captured a major chunk of the market. The company offered more value to customers than competitors, with exclusive coupons and real time notifications. The fight to the top will however, be an entirely different one on the mobile front. Focusing on customers, however, might still continue to drive innovation in the industry.
