Moving towards a super-app for India: what it takes to be a one stop solution for an Indian netizen

Abstract

The world of e-commerce strategy, especially in India, is going through a massive upheaval. Be it the rise of the mobile as the primary device or the rising need of personalization, e-commerce giants are scrambling to gain customer loyalty. China, a relatively more stable e-commerce market, has witnessed the rise of WeChat, which started as a messaging app and became a one-stop solution for everything ranging from payments to arranging transportation. WeChat’s social media feed has also been considered immensely influential in shaping the virtual opinion of Chinese netizens. A similar battleground has been forming in India, with entities such as Flipkart, Justdial and Amazon moving towards developing all-in-one capabilities and loyalty programmes so that visitors have more reasons to keep coming back to the app. However, the differences in Indian and Chinese customers are quite a bit: internet penetration in India is much lower (~35% as opposed to China’s 95.1%), customer shopping habits are different and the Indian e-payment sector is relatively underdeveloped; to name a few. The question to ask in this context is what would it take for an internet application to succeed in the sphere of the ‘super-apps’ . This project aims to seek an answer for the same.