E-Commerce In The Epoch Of The Covid-19 Pandemic And Establishing ODR As A Technique

E-Commerce In The Epoch Of The Covid-19 Pandemic And Establishing ODR As A Technique To Ensure Consumer Protection

Adv Mrudula Ilapakurthy

E-commerce during the Pandemic

The days before e-commerce sites like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra as such are not remembered by many since shopping from the comfort of one’s home brought in unprecedented ‘cash-backs’, ‘discounts’, ‘flash sales’, and ‘buy-one-get-one-frees’, whether it is to procure online services or to purchase Fast moving consumer goods. WorldPay from FIS’s Global Payments Report, 2021 reported based on following the trends in 40+ markets that digital commerce has accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic1 and is expected to grow further in the coming years. Sufficient to say that in India, the upsurge was unlike anything witnessed before. As per the Indian E-commerce Industry analysis of the Indian Brand Equity Foundation’s (IBEF) report, the Indian e-commerce is expected to grow to US $ 111.40 billion by 2025, US $ 350 billion, from just US $ 46.2 billion as of 2020. Despite SARS-Cov-2, in 2021, the e-commerce market continued to grow steadily at 5% in India. Of all the contributing factors to this, accelerated growth can be traced back to the increase in internet connectivity and digital literacy owing to the ‘Digital India’ programme, which saw about 784.59 million connectivities out of which about 59% are from rural India.2 Other reasons which contributed to this ecosystem of growth of e-commerce in India could be various Governmental initiatives such as ‘Make in India’, ‘Start-up India’, ‘Skill Development Initiative’, Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal trade’s (DPIIT) ‘Open Network for Digital Commerce’ regime to set protocols for vendor and price discovery and for cataloguing, etc. The key takeaway is that Covid-19 pandemic has interestingly caused a benchmark shift in consumer demand and created a new space within the e-commerce ecosystem3, with several e-commerce websites citing an increase in first time users after the pandemic4.