Foreign media say e-commerce is booming in India, driven by the coVID-19 pandemic. The business model has become an important shopping option in this vast market of 1.35bn people, thanks to strict quarantine measures.

According to a report by Efe News Agency in New Delhi on October 10, e-commerce accounted for only 1.5 percent of total merchandise sales in India in 2016. It took the country three years to double that number to 3% by 2019. But this rose to 4.5 percent in the first six months of 2020 alone, according to a study by e-Commerce technology firm Unicommerce.

In June alone, after India had just begun to relax strict controls imposed at the end of March and allow the purchase of all categories of goods (previously only basic necessities were allowed), e-commerce orders were 17 per cent higher than in the same period before the pandemic, the report said.

"The pandemic made life and commerce happen, and consumers' behavior changed enormously," said Kapil Makija, President of Unicomcircuit. With the rise of first-time online shoppers, the industry is witnessing an important chapter. In the long run, this change will provide a huge boost to the development of e-commerce."

"This will be seen as one of the biggest turning points in the development of the e-commerce ecosystem in India," the company's report said.

Reported that now, as India's important festival diwali is coming, the country's largest consumption season is about to open, leading e-commerce companies - amazon (India), Foley general carter and reliance, by tens of thousands of new employees, and expand the distribution and storage system to accelerate the expansion of its business.

Amazon India, the market leader with 350 million registered users, announced plans to hire at least 50,000 new employees to strengthen its service centers as it expanded plans to build 10 new centers and expand seven in 19 Indian states amid the economic downturn.

Meanwhile, Flippcat, which is owned by Wal-Mart in the US, has 250m registered users. The company announced it would hire 70, 000 new temporary workers to expand its entire supply chain.

The report said restrictions on people's travel and the increasing curve of the epidemic data constituted favorable conditions for further accelerated development of the Indian e-commerce market.

Revenue from India's e-commerce industry is expected to grow 51 percent annually from $39 billion in 2017 to $120 billion in 2020, according to the Competition Commission.