Discovery leading to a purchase decision used to happen through friends or family and was built around trust through word of mouth. This is still somewhat true in today’s era but the medium has changed from physical to digital with content creators influencing their decision making.
Today, from Mumbai to Meerut, discovery through content happens at the same platform, of the same product, almost at the same time. The closing of the knowledge gap and hence the aspiration is an underrated catalyst for Indian retail which is now changing user behaviour one reel at a time.
The numbers make the stakes plain. According to a report by Bain & Company, India's e-retail market is around $60 billion today and is expected to roughly triple to $170-190 billion by 2030, on a base of more than 270 million online shoppers. The engine is not the metros. Tier II and smaller cities already drive around 80% of ecommerce growth. GenZ accounts for 40%-45% of India’s online shoppers with spend per shopper rising more than twice as fast as any other cohort. This is the segment to build for since digital behaviour and aspiration run deep here. They carry metro taste with non-metro budgets. The demand has already moved. The infrastructure to serve it well has not.
Access still remains a significant gap for the Bharat consumer and here it means affordability and convenience. They can still get the branded products online through traditional ecommerce platforms to fulfil their growing aspirations. But most products available on those platforms don't fit their budgets and are often not what mass Bharat buys. What mass Bharat usually buys is available in unorganised offline city markets, usually 30-50% lower priced products than what's available on traditional ecommerce platforms.
But the offline city market lacks aspiration. What is lacking in their life today is the option to buy better brands, better products with better service within their budget. The ecommerce and qcommerce model in metros isn’t built to cater to this problem and this consumer. Hence a copy paste approach will not work.
This is why value comes first. A product is "inaccessible" to the Bharat consumer not because it is not available online but because it sits outside their budget. The willingness to buy branded goods over an unbranded substitute is real, but does not lead to paying a metro premium for it. The moment aspiration costs meaningfully more than the alternative, the purchase does not happen. Access, in this market, begins with a better brand or product at a price the consumer considers fair.
Convenience is the second lever, and it is just as decisive. Local retail does not offer the same assortment as online. Even the online marketplaces that stock it deliver too slow and carry a lingering doubt about product fidelity. Fast delivery and a wide, trustworthy assortment are not premium features in Bharat. They are the difference between a successful order and an abandoned cart.
Now look at why the incumbents do not close this gap, yet. Horizontal marketplaces reach these cities but arrive slow and don't fit their budget. Quick commerce, for all its promise, was built for grocery-adjacent convenience in the metros and maybe for affluent audiences in Tier II cities, not for curated aspirations at a Bharat price point.
A straight copy-paste of the metro quick commerce model into these markets misreads the customer entirely. On the other hand, offline retail cannot deliver the convenience and assortment these consumers actually want. Each was built for a different customer, in a different city, in a different decade.
This is where the opportunity sits, and it is enormous. The next defining commerce company in India will not win on discovery, because discovery is already free and universal. It will win on access, redefined for this consumer as the right brands and products, at a price they find fair, delivered fast, from an assortment far wider than any shop in their city can offer. Deliver aspiration while solving value and convenience together, and you unlock a consumer that everyone can already see but almost no one is serving well.
Discovery was the last decade's battle and it is over. Access, redefined around value and convenience, is the next one–it is wide open.
(Naman Lahoty is a Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners)
