Who knew Chennai would ever be called a ‘key-chain’ hub? Or that it would take a census to tell us that Chennai’s men who love their lush moustaches well-groomed has led to the city becoming the country’s biggest purchaser of moustache-trimmers? Online shopping website eBay’s annual census reveals plenty of interesting trends about the online shopping habits of people in Chennai, India’s fifth largest internet shopping hub.
Taking the entire State into consideration however, Tamil Nadu is the ‘most wired state’ after Andhra Pradesh, with the largest number of e-commerce hubs, meaning towns, cities and villages where things are bought or sold online.
Revealing 2012 statistics about the thriving online marketplace, Ramkumar Narayanan, GM, Product Development for eBay said, “In 2012, we recorded 6.1 million Indians visiting e-commerce websites and 8 million of them buy things online. eBay alone has 5 million users in India and 12 products are bought or sold on the website every minute.” While technology and gadgets ruled the roost in Chennai, with mobile and laptop accessories, pen-drives, smart phones and electronic tablets being the most popular buys, Tamil Nadu also sold the maximum number of condoms to customers across India.
After gadgets, Chennaiites also sold the most key-chains, followed by pet accessories and toys. Collectables such as British India coins, China stamps and Indian First Day postal covers were also big among the city’s online traders.
The one-of-its-kind survey goes into great detail, also revealing that people in Gopalapuram are very particular about how their cars smell, while residents of Adyar stock up on emergency lamps to ensure that are not left stuck in the dark during a power-cut.
The long hours of power-cuts notwithstanding, rural Tamil Nadu is also plugged into e-commerce, the survey shows. Apart from tier-two cities like Trichy, Madurai and Salem, smaller towns like Villupuram and Kuttalam made it into the top ten rural e-commerce hubs in India. A possible explanation would be that more people are purchasing goods through their mobile phones — 13 billion people worldwide are mobile-shoppers.
While Indians on eBay sell their goods to customers in 201 different countries, Chennai’s main exports include natural emeralds, marble tiles, temporary tattoos, men’s shirts and underwear.