Junglee sees 34% spate in clicks during 2014 spring/summer season, men’s apparel catches up strongly

E-commerce in India has come a long way. While we see a lot of action happening as far as online marketplace and etail stores are concerned, aggregation format has also been growing with decent pace over the past couple of years. At present, close to half a dozen players such as Junglee, Buyt, and Pricedekho among others have been helping consumers hunt for lowest price-point.

Launched in February 2012, Amazon-owned price comparison platform Junglee appears to be a leader in aggregation space with over 30 million listings across 25 categories. At present, it lists about 2200 online shopping sites and 1 lakh plus offline stores.

The company witnessed a 34% increase in clicks to seller sites during the Spring Summer’14 EOSS (27th June to 31st July) as compared to Autumn Winter’13 (1st Jan to 10th Feb).

The platform recently enabled businesses nearby in a few categories with thousands of physical stores across top metros, enabling customers find nearby locations to purchase the product. “In January, we tied up with Quikr.com wherein consumers can now check online prices of new and pre-owned products, and find local sellers on Junglee.com,” says Mahendra Nerurkar, General Manager, Junglee.com.

On an average, the company witnesses about 15 million sessions per month. It recently unveiled the Junglee Android app with features like auto-suggestion, filters to help refine results by brand, price, item condition, discount, average customer review and more attributes.

Consumer electronics is the biggest category on Junglee, closely followed by apparel. PC, shoes, watches and kitchenware are also significantly sizeable in terms of traffic to the site. Looking at the current momentum of relatively smaller but up and coming categories, jewelry stands out. “The search pertaining to electronics is largely brand-led while feature-led search for mobile phones in specific, dual-SIM tops the chart,” says Mahendra.

“In terms of categories performance, men’s clothing and men’s shoes performed the best contributing to 35% of total clicks to seller sites followed by women’s clothing which contributed to 15% of total clicks,” adds Mahendra.

According to key findings of Junglee summer trends report 2014, air coolers took the top slot in home appliance witnessing an increase in demand by 40X. The demand for refrigerators in home appliances went up to 32% between April and June as compared to 12% last quarter.

The search for ACs increased to 12% from 4% last quarter, with split ACs being the most popular and witnessing a 5X increase in searches while the searches for window and portable ACs doubled. The top three brands in split ACs were LG, Samsung and Haier respectively.

“There was a clear push northwards in demand for weight loss products as plentifully evident by a 200% jump in them as compared to the previous quarter. Sports supplements too increased in demand by 30%,” says Mahendra.

An interesting contrast to the brand-led search is how Indian apparel is searched. Search in this category is largely descriptive where sizeable search terms hinge around the variants customers want to check out within a sub-category.

For western wear, the search is relatively more brand-led as the customers seem more aware and clear about the western apparel brands that would fit their style and persona. Newer trends in western wear like lace tops, stoles/shrugs are more exploratory.