Online shopping behaviour in metropolitan cities seems to have changed during the extended nationwide lockdown as per the trend observed by Simpl, a payment platform.
The company has recorded a surge in the number of transactions done for daily essentials, despite supply and workforce issues faced by merchants.
“The bill size per user has increased by 30-35% across the board. Prior to the lockdown, 30-40% of the online users ordered groceries and home essentials between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. whereas 60-70% users made transactions between 6 p.m. to 9 .pm.,” the company said.
Post lockdown, those transactions are happening on an hourly basis, it said, adding online grocery and essential shopping are becoming the new normal during work-from-home routines.
“There is about a 30-40% increase in the number of new offline-to-online users trying out services from online hyper local merchants compared with the pre-lockdown months,” the company said.
Also, the average ticket size of medicine orders has doubled with a 40-45% increase in the number of online transactions post the first phase of lockdown.
The increase in online orders was majorly witnessed from the metro cities as compared with tier 1 and tier 2 cities, it said.
Nityanand Sharma, co-founder, and CEO, Simpl, said, “Groceries or essential shopping through online platforms used to happen mostly over the weekends or start of the month before the advent of COVID-19. But post lockdown, transactions are happening throughout the day over the week.”
“The rise in online transactions recently made through Simpl indicates an average 1.5x (times) increase in ticket size and a 40% spike in the overall GMV (gross merchandise value) of offline merchant partners,” he said.
“This is an interesting trend in our bid to promote a safe mode of payment,” he added.
Meanwhile, requests by users to delay the repayments due date have surged by 3-4% post the lockdown announcement.
