Great marketer once said,"Any purchase without a planned written or typed list of things to buy is an impulse purchase." With the rise of modern trade in India, more & more customers of India chose to go to shopping malls & megastores instead of going to their regular retail vendors. But the trends are shifting again, with the rise of Snapdeal, Flipkart & amazon in India, customers are going one step ahead and looking to buy everything online.
Even if they love the experience of buying, they are not ready to let go of their mobiles. Customers are looking for experiential buying on the mobiles. This brings me to the main painpoint of planned & impulse buying in India. Customers want to create that impulse decision making experience in the shopping but are also becoming more & more aware about what they want to buy, the lines between planned purchase & impulse purchase are blurring.
Biggest exception to this larger trend is from grocery shopping experience. Customers still like to buy their vegetables at wet markets, as there is something fresh & refreshing about buying groceries from the dirtiest wet markets in India. Women find it a game of skill to negotiate with the vendors & men find buying fresh items to cook themselves as therapeutic. But I feel the customers are missing the point of simplifying their lives her. Buying vegetables at wet markets is not as pleasant experience as sitting in front of you play-station playing COD & receiving equally fresh vegetables at your doorstep & cooking nice cuisines which you always wanted to try.
I believe Indian shopping is still in the phase of growth where the consumers have not adopted the modern way of shopping which is spending least amount of time shopping & more time using the things which they have bought. I believe with the rise of automated assistance like alexa, google homes & many more upcoming chat bots, this behavior will shift & wet markets will find their place in the dumps as they have been all the time. If the firms delivering groceries reach out to these same vendors by by traveling the last mile to vegetable growers, the customers can easily be benefited.
Obviously many of the sentimental readers will say shopping is an experience & it will never be completely automated, but I would like to defer, I have been living in a cluttered city since last 3 years, and one thing I have understood is the people who use their time best on using the things they have bought instead of spending time buying the right item excel.
That being said such adoption will take time to move from traditional methods to future ready shopping marketplaces.