India ranks 71 in e-commerce

Indian ranks 71st globally in terms of usage of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, as per United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's annual index for 2020. India has moved up four slots from the 2019 index, but is still placed lower than countries like Vietnam.

India has moved up from 75th position in the 2019 index to 71st in the latest index. However, it fares quite poor in several parameters of the index. Only 2.9 per cent of the total population in India aged 15 years and above used the internet to buy something online in a year's time, as per the latest data available with Unctad.

While 20 per cent of the internet users in India are e-commerce shoppers, only 34 per cent of the people in India use the internet. However, 80 per cent of the population has an account with a financial institution or a provider of mobile money services.

"The e-commerce divide remains huge," said Shamika N. Sirimanne, director of Unctad's division that prepares the annual index. "Even among G20 countries, the extent to which people shop online ranges from 3 per cent in India to 87 per cent in the United Kingdom."

While Unctad has used data available up to 2019 for the 2020 index, the pandemic has improved many of the parameters since then.

For the first time, Switzerland topped the Unctad B2C E-commerce Index, just ahead of the Netherlands. In 2019, as high as 97 per cent of the Swiss population used the internet. The only non-European economies among the top 10 are Singapore, ranked fourth, and Hong Kong, in the 10th position. The index scores 152 nations on their readiness for online shopping.

Countries are ranked on the basis of access to secure internet servers, reliability of postal services and infrastructure, and the portion of their population that uses the internet and has an account with a financial institution or provider of mobile money services.

Countries like Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Vietnam ranked higher than India in the global index. Even among the East, South and Southeast Asian economies, India was ranked 10th.

"The Covid-19 pandemic has made it more urgent to ensure the countries trailing behind are able to catch up and strengthen their e-trade readiness," Sirimanne said.