Festive Shopping Index featured on Statista

Festive Shopping Index 2017-2020

Since 2017, LitmusWorld, in association with the Retailers Association of India (RAI), has been conducting an annual consumer sentiment survey to measure the Indian consumers’ shopping sentiment during the festive season.

The resulting Festive Shopping Index indicates predominant consumer shopping behaviours through an analytical dashboard, providing comprehensive knowledge and insights on what shoppers are looking forward to during the festive season. The index gives retailers a guide to becoming more consumer-centric during the most crucial quarter of the year. 

Shopping Budgets

The survey highlights that the shopping budgets indicatively shrunk during the festive season 2020 with around 58% decline in the super shopper category: i.e. consumers with a budget of over Rs 1 lakh for the festive season, as compared to last year. Interestingly, 21% of consumers intended to spend up to Rs 5,000 in 2020, which was an increase from 15% last year.

Shopping Categories

The categories that showed a significant demand were: Apparel (53%), Home appliances and electronics (47%), Work-from-home products (37%) and Home furniture (34%). 

The onset of the pandemic in 2020 had pushed consumers to find substitutes to carry out home chores at ease while balancing their professional lives and working from home. This gave a boost in the demand for home appliances, consumer durables, and work essentials.

Payment Modes

Digital payments continued to be the preferred mode of payment with 67% of consumers preferring credits cards. While as many as 21% of consumers indicated a preference for making payments through UPI, the preference for mobile wallets (37%) saw a surge of 7X as compared to the previous year. 

Shopping Channels

Preference for online shopping increased significantly every year, as consumers planned to shop more online (75%) than at stand-alone stores (66%) or malls (37%). 

A new trend that emerged in the year 2020 was shopping on social media, with 21% of consumers looking at exploring this channel to fulfil their shopping needs this festive season. 

Shopping Types

In 2020, the occurrence of global pandemic and lockdown restricted the need for materialistic demands of consumers. As a result, 50% of shopping was inclined towards essential products, while 18% of consumers preferred shopping for gifting to reconnect with family and friends.

Found this insightful and useful? Check out the Festive Shopping Index reports for 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Want to know how your business can benefit from customised surveys and insightful dashboard analytics? Please contact us and discover how we can help you track real-time customer experience to enhance your business.

To know more, and experience India’s most trusted CX platform, request a free demo today!