How India shopped through e-commerce in 2022, according to Meesho
Men from Tier 4 towns cornered the lion's share of grooming products, making up >60% of all orders.
E-commerce marketplace Meesho listed some key highlights capturing how India shopped in 2022.
'Smartwatch' was the second-most searched product in 2022, showing how Indians are moving the needle on physical activity. Men are showing higher propensity than ever for grooming products, with more than 60% of orders coming from Tier 4 markets. Sales of fitness equipment – dumbbells, treadmills, elliptical trainers, etc. – surged 3X as orders poured in from Srinagar and Mathura to Guntur and Siliguri. Yoga got a thumbs up from metro-dwellers, with Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai buying the most yoga mats. Orders for sanitary napkins grew 9X in Tier 2+ cities, demonstrating how e-commerce is creating accessibility for millions of women in Bharat.
2022 shopping cart
Consumers from Uttar Pradesh which has bought the maximum amount of cricket gear, followed by Maharashtra, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.
With 148 sarees sold per minute and demand coming in from all corners of the country, India's love for the attire continues to grow.
93,000 t-shirts, 51,725 bluetooth earphones and 21,662 lipsticks were sold every day. Haryana stocked up on bed sheets, Jharkhand snapped up extension boards, Rajasthan took a special liking to bluetooth earphones while Assam bought body lotions like nobody's business.
Eight in 10 orders for books came from Tier 2+ markets, with shoppers showing a clear inclination for self-help bestsellers like Ikigai, Atomic Habits, The Psychology of Money and Rich Dad Poor Dad.
India's shopping prime time
Sundays are the day when Indians indulged in online shopping the most in 2022. Last year, Wednesday was that day. 8 PM every day was shopping prime time for Meesho customers, a change from 2021 when 2-3 PM saw the most traffic.
"A customer from Uttar Pradesh placed an order every waking hour, totaling a whopping 6,384 orders in 2022. Millions of customers used local landmarks like 'pipal ka ped', 'bargad ka ped', 'atta chakki ke peeche' and 'near water tank' to help direct delivery personnel. Move over digital maps; there's no competing with the accuracy of the desi navigation tool," reads the release.
A peek into scale
From Mumbai to Mirzapur, a record 91 crore orders were placed this year (up 135% YoY), equalling India's registered voter base in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
At ~140 million, Meesho's annual transacting users exceed the combined population of the top three nations in FIFA World Cup 2022: France, Argentina and Croatia.
Customers from Andaman & Nicobar Islands are the most prolific with the highest number of orders per shopper, followed by Ladakh and the north-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim.
Meesho sellers
Meesho sellers saved Rs 3,700 crore in commissions in 2022, courtesy of Meesho's industry-first zero commission model. Nearly 130,000 Meesho sellers became lakhpatis and 6,000 became crorepatis in 2022, with Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh leading the charge. Thousands of these sellers came from small towns like Sagar, Rewa and Damoh (Madhya Pradesh), Panipat and Karnal (Haryana) and Sanngli (Maharashtra). Meesho onboarded ~500,000 suppliers in 2022, with 61% of them new-to-e-commerce and selling online for the first time.
