E-commerce marketplace Meesho found that in 2022, Sunday was the most preferred day to shop for Indians, while 8 PM every day was shopping prime time
Mumbai: In its yearly round-up, e-commerce marketplace Meesho found in 2022, Sunday is the day when Indians indulge in online shopping the most. In 2021, it was Wednesday, shared Meesho in a release. Meesho’s yearly reflection revealed several insights into the way India shopped in 2022.
The 2022 shopping cart
Whoever thought sarees were out of fashion should think again. Meesho sold 148 sarees per minute with demand coming in from all corners of the country.
As many as 93,000 t-shirts, 51,725 Bluetooth earphones and 21,662 lipsticks were sold every day.
A customer from Uttar Pradesh placed an order every waking hour, totalling a whopping 6,384 orders in 2022.
8 PM every day was shopping prime time for Meesho customers, a change from 2021 when 2-3 PM saw the most traffic.
‘Smartwatch’ was the second-most searched product in 2022, showing how Indians are moving the needle on physical activity.
Men are showing a 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 3 times 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 nine times in Tier 2+ cities, demonstrating the power of e-commerce in making hygiene accessible to millions of women in Bharat.
Regional insights
Uttar Pradesh bought the maximum amount of cricket gear, followed by Maharashtra, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.
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.
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.
The scale
Order volumes equalled the country’s total electorate: From Mumbai to Mirzapur, a record 91 crore orders were placed this year (up 135% YoY) on Meesho equalling India’s registered voter base in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
At ~140 million, the annual transacting users on Meesho exceed the combined population of the top three nations in FIFA World Cup 2022: France, Argentina and Croatia.
Sellers’ story
Meesho works on a zero-commission model. This resulted in its sellers saving Rs 3,700 crore in commissions in 2022.
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 Sangli (Maharashtra).
Meesho onboarded ~500,000 suppliers in 2022, with 61% of them new-to-e-commerce and selling online for the first time.
