The human tendency to make a saving can be traced back to pre-historic times. Earlier, when e-commerce was not there, people used to ask the brick and mortar stores for discounts citing reasons like being loyal to a particular shop. Discount coupons trigger our in-born inclination to conserve and have been playing a major part in sketching the business strategy for companies. The very first coupon was offered in 1888 by Coca-Cola, and since then this coupon industry today has evolved into a major business worth $20 billion. The growth has been immense since the advent of the internet and digital media.

With e-commerce on the rise and more and more people getting the taste of buying things online, a large chunk of global coupon market share is now attributed to digital coupons. Technology keeps changing and nowadays the change is much more rapid and evident than ever before. Keeping in tune with the technology growth, the couponing industry too has undergone evolution and transformation. Today you have apps, which keep track of all the coupon deals available on a particular day on particular brands. All you need to do is download those apps. Digital coupons today not only serve the purpose of deals and discounts, but they also help in increasing customer base, retaining old ones and increasing loyalty and brand building.

Today, India is standing at the cusp of witnessing the fastest growing e-commerce market in the entire Asia Pacific region. The coupon business is 13.5 percent of the total e-commerce audience in India, and it is growing at the rate of 62.9 per cent year on year basis, which is huge. The Indian consumers, who were earlier apprehensive about shopping online, have shed their inhibitions and are now browsing more often. They are not afraid of making high-value purchases and availing experiential offers. According to data, nearly 95 percent buyers search for deals online and 74 percent view the coupons available on couponing portals.

These figures reveal the healthy status of the coupon market in India. Indian users today are happy to get great online shopping discounts in the form of coupons and are making the best use of it.

There has been a big transformation happening in the ecommerce sector. Amazon in India is adding millions of users on a monthly basis; on the other side,Flipkart is losing its customers at a faster pace.

In the past six months, Amazon has pulled in six million active users on the mobile app.In the meanwhile,Flipkart has lost approximately eight million users. The data from the famous App Annie shows that the total number of monthly users in Flipkart app platform fell from 90 million in the month of January to 82 million in the month of June and Amazon’s share increased from 59 million to 64 million. Snapdeal had another depressing story to tell as its active users dropped from 38 million in the month of January to 33 million in the month of June.

Earlier in the month of June, the CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos wrote a 3 billion dollars check for India after the onlineretailer’s 2 billion dollars commitment in the year. Many analysts stated that this was a proper indication of Amazon for consolidating the business in India ahead of Alibaba, which also looks very strong. Jeff made the announcement at an event that was held in Washington, which was attended by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The e-store owners have been pushed to the back foot of late with the capital not flowing in as easily as it was about a year ago. The data that was retrieved from the Jefferies displays inflows into the online business in the 3 months to June were of the order of 528 million dollar, which is the least in the past 8 months. The fund raising in the first quarter was 50% less on a year-on-year chart, which thereby confirms that this trend has been reported for a lot of months now. It is a bigger challenge for big players who are planning to rise to over 100 million dollars.

Although the ecommerce giant is not short on funds, Amazon is not very happy with the recent government guidelines, which do not allow a single vendor to contribute more than 25 percent of the ecommerce revenues. In the case of Amazon, the cloudtail is supposedly contributing more than 25 percent.