Online shopping hits sales in shops in Mizoram

With shopping at the click of a mouse gaining popularity, sales were hit in shops here during Christmas last year when buying is usually at its peak in this Christian dominated state in the Northeast.

Shopkeepers at the Millennium Centre here which houses around 332 shops said that sales had gone down by at least 25 per cent compared to 2012 pre-Christmas shopping.

Lalrinmawii, a shopkeeper, said her sale decreased to a large extent because of the increasing popularity of online shopping. She said that while she sold over Rs 1 lakh worth garments on December 24 in 2012, her sales on the same day in 2013 was less than Rs 50,000.

"Increasing inflow of garments and other goods from Myanmar, opening of more new shops and declining purchasing power of the people are also hitting our business," she added.

Time Cell Enterprise, which sells watches, complained that sales took a considerable hit during peak Christmas shopping days.

"Our sales of watches were good and managed to reach Rs 1 lakh margin in a day during Christmas earlier for which we received an award from one of the watch manufacturing companies," a sales girl said, adding that the average sale in December 2013 was merely around Rs 10,000 daily.

A sales girl of a shop selling both men and women's garments also said that sales decreased during December 2013 compared to the past years.

She said that the decline in sales was due to high increase in consumer goods and scarcity of hard cash.

"I sold more men's clothes than women's garments this time and I managed to sell only few women jackets a few days before Christmas," she lamented.

Some said that devaluation of the rupee resulted in sharp increase in prices of consumer goods.

Women's garments, usually were the hottest items everywhere, but except for boots and bags, other women's items were not so hot during Christmas 2013.

Men's shoes also did not have a good market as the prices in shopping malls were high resulting in people going for online for bargain buys.

A society of haute couture, Mizos usually favoured high fashion mainly imported from Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, mainland China and South Korea.

Sources in courier service companies here said that earlier, they received mainly cheques, documents and office stationeries.

"Since the beginning of 2013, we began to handle large amount of parcels of shoes, T-shirts and sweaters," they said.

They said that they used to receive around 50 parcels a day while this went up to an average of 200 parcels daily during December, 2013 and the largest number of parcels contained shoes.

A local courier company at Zarkawt locality usually received around 700 parcels in a month which increased to 2,000 during December 2013.