E commerce not only deals with the buying and selling of products or services but it also includes many other activities which are being performed on this platform, e.g. advertising and promotions. Many digital marketers have started thinking on these lines to how to promote their product and services online and have come up with many new innovative ideas of promoting the business with the use of wide array of upcoming technologies and techniques for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of their business process. Gamification is one of those techniques and it seems, it is being proved to be critical and successful promotion technique for many companies. The Indian retail market has a significant presence in the Indian economy and it is…show more content… This research aims to find the influencing factors and their intervening effect that influence the consumers in gamification adoption, particularly in online shopping. This chapter presents an introduction and set as a background of the current research by providing the evolution and current scenario of the internet usage and online retail industry in the global and Indian context and gives insights on the emerging technique for promoting the business i.e. Gamification. The need and scope of the study are motivated by seeing the shifting shopping trends and consumer’s behaviour towards the upcoming technologies. This leads to the research question and finally, the objectives of the…show more content… It is not among the top users of the internet but it has the highest growth rate in internet usage i.e. 14% in last one year with 243 million web users (source: live internet stat 2014) which is estimated as the third largest base for the use of internet in the world after China and the United States (source: Mary meeker report 2014). Earlier the internet was confined to only urban areas and was used for only few activities like emailing or news but now it is being used for many other day to day activities. Table 1.1 shows the evolution of the internet in India.
Table 1.1: Evolution and Growth of Internet usage in India
2008 2010 2012
Online activities E-mails & News E-mails, News, Travel, Social Media E-mails, News, Travel, Social Media, Shopping, Gaming, Video Streaming, Application downloads, Mobile / Internet Banking
No. of active internet users (mn) 50 75 120
No of face book users(mn) 1 8 71
No of railway tickets booked online per annum (mn) 19 72 116
Number of income tax returns filed online per annum (mn) 2 5