Delhi-NCR is India’s online shopping capital and its habits are contagious

At Flipkart’s headquarters in Bengaluru, a large screen displays a map of India with demand patterns lighting up in clusters. Over the years, one cluster has steadily grown brighter than the rest. In the north of the country, centred around Delhi-NCR, ecommerce demand has been deepening and spreading even before the pandemic sped up online adoption across India.

For many ecommerce companies today, Delhi-NCR is the single largest market. That is somewhat surprising. Southern cities such as Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad have high urban incomes and were among the earliest to shop online. Many of India’s biggest ecommerce firms, including Flipkart, Amazon, Swiggy, BigBasket and Zepto, are headquartered in Bengaluru, a city long known for its adventurous consumer base. Yet the centre of gravity for online shopping has moved north, and it has been doing so for years.

What makes Delhi-NCR different is not just its size. The region has produced a shopper who is unusually eager to try new things, whether that is a D2C trouser brand or a 10-minute grocery delivery. That willingness is backed by infrastructure that few Indian cities can rival: a dense warehousing network, cheaper commercial real estate for dark stores, strong road connectivity and a deep pool of logistics workers. When global brands such as Uniqlo and Lululemon wanted to test the Indian consumer, they chose Delhi-NCR for their first stores, not Bengaluru or Mumbai.