Online sales in India accounted for 1.6% of total retail sales with intraregional trade in south Asia remaining low, the World Bank said on Monday.
“While it has grown substantially in recent years, ecommerce in the region is still very small: even in India, online sales as a percentage of total retail sales were only 1.6%, versus over 15% for China and around 14% globally,” said a report, ‘Unleashing Ecommerce for South Asian Integration’.
Indian firms, which tend to be more digitised and more heavily concentrated in service sectors than in the other countries, tended to highlight regulatory issues — like tax rules and data piracy challenges among their top challenges to engaging with ecommerce, it said.