Metros SpendMmost On Apparels Online, Says MasterCard

NEW DELHI: If you are swiping your card regularly or making online transactions, you are most likely buying clothes. According to MasterCard, apparel is the top category across all metros in the country. And, people in Chennai spend the most on clothes and jewellery, followed closely by Bengaluru.

“Penetration of electronic payments is still very low in India but there is an immense opportunity. The roll out of the identity project (Aadhaar) will provide a great platform for commerce and all sort of things can be built on that platform,” said Ann Cairns, president, international markets, MasterCard.

MasterCard, said to be the world’s second-largest payment and technology firm, opened its analysis centre in Delhi last year. It’s looking to process an ever-growing amount of global data, now at 10 petabytes (a million gigabytes), and sell information as a stand-alone product, or provide consulting based on that.

“Because our data is online and real time, we can tell what people are really buying, what consumers are doing in the economy and we are not just relying on our information but co-relating with external sources,” said Cairns. According to MasterCard data, foreign travellers are largely from the US, UK and UAE and they spend mostly on jewellery and giftware.

“In some cases, cross-border transactions have fallen because Europeans are travelling within the continent and not outside,” explained Cairns.

Within India, spending in cities such as Lucknow, Visakhapatnam, Chandigarh and Nagpur are growing more rapidly than in the metros.

The payment company is hopeful that India will follow trends that have been observed in some of Far Eastern countries. “There, transactions are shifting more online, (there’s a) massive increase in cross-border commerce. In places like South Korea, we have seen people buying things directly from America through online (sites),” said Cairns.

According to an Assocham report, India’s e-commerce market, which stood at $2.5 billion in 2009, reached $8.5 billion in 2012 and rose 88% to touch $16 billion in 2013. The survey estimates the country’s e-commerce market to reach $56 billion by 2023, driven by rising online retail. Last week, the industry body had asked the government to remove the ban on FDI in retail e-commerce business.