Over the years, India has emerged not only as a manufacturing powerhouse but also one of the largest e-commerce markets globally.

As of 2024, India’s e-retail market was estimated at about $60 billion, per Bain, with its market value projected to reach $325 billion by 2030.

At the center of this success are online retailers like Myntra, which was acquired by local e-comm giant Flipkart in 2014. Per an Economic Times report, the retailer’s net profit skyrocketed nearly 18x to 548 crore (~$62 million) from 31 crore the previous year. Meanwhile, operating revenue rose 18% to 6,043 crore (~$687 million).

Sunder Balasubramanian, CMO at Myntra—which sells everything from apparel to beauty, home, and tech—believes many factors have formed the backbone of the online boom. They include widespread internet and smartphone usage at low prices and by extension, more access.

“This really allowed the mobile phone to become an access point like nothing else before for the consumer at large in the country, and that is the trend on which e-commerce piggybacked,” Balasubramanian told Retail Brew.

He added that as a large country with more than 600,000 villages, before mobile became ubiquitous, “most of the point of access is related to the physical retail shops…if you wanted any of the larger brands, you had to travel to the bigger cities.”

Keep reading here.—JS

Nearly a year after new FTC chair Andrew Ferguson halted public comment on surveillance pricing, the topic has resurfaced in Washington amid a new investigation into Instacart’s pricing tactics.

Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union released a new report this week claiming Instacart’s AI pricing tool offers consumers individualized prices even when simultaneously adding the same items from the same grocery stores to their carts.

The investigation utilized 437 shoppers across four cities at two Target and three Safeway stores. Of the grocery items added to cart, 74% had differing price points from shopper to shopper, with up to five different prices per item. A Washington, DC, Safeway, for example, offered a dozen Lucerne eggs for ​​$3.99, $4.28, $4.59, $4.69, and $4.79. The average differential between high and low prices was 13%, but ranged up to 23%—which was the case for products like Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter and Wheat Thins at a Seattle Safeway.

Shopping basket totals varied by about 7%, reaching as high as 8.4%, which the report estimated could amount to $1,200 more per year for shoppers, based on an average four-person household’s annual grocery spend.

Keep reading here.—EC

Shopify unveiled major upgrades to Sidekick, its AI-powered commerce assistant for merchants, at the company’s recent Editions event, a biannual gathering where the tech giant unveils a flurry of new products.

On Wednesday, S​​hopify said it has made significant investments in Sidekick as part of its AI transformation strategy. “[This] Editions moment is all about the AI renaissance,” Amanda Engelman, director of product at Shopify, told Retail Brew. “We are in, obviously, a very transformative moment across so many different functions, but something that we care very deeply about at Shopify, too, is how do we use AI to supplement the creativity to allow our merchants to move faster, to help them understand their gaps or their opportunities significantly quicker?”

The AI assistant, which first launched in 2023, will also be able to build custom admin apps for Shopify merchants that developers are typically hired to do. Overall, Shopify is adding an AI layer to Sidekick that automates things like backend support and implementation tasks for merchants, eliminating the need for technical expertise.

Keep reading here.—VC

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