Trend: Indian Consumers favour Net research for gadget buys

According to the Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions’ Consumer Electronics Survey conducted by Synovate during August to October 2007 for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions gadget buffs in India are increasingly moving online to research their next consumer electronic products purchase, with an overwhelming 83 per cent of survey respondents citing the Net as their most-tapped resource for such buys.While vendor sites emerged as the most used resource, portals came second, followed by search engines, and product review Web sites.
This comes on the back of Ebay India confirming that gadgets are the hottest products on their sites also. Survey also says that Internet was the preferred choice in India because consumers could find the latest available models (67 per cent) and compare product features (65 per cent), and prices (62 per cent) and because they could do this at any time (61 per cent). Interestingly, quality and price were the key criteria for purchasing consumer electronics, rather than the brand name.
Another important results of the survey was that products most often researched by the respondents included mobile phones, laptop computers and digital cameras which were also among the top three preferred electronic products bought online by Indian users. The purchase decisions for electronics most often appeared to be influenced by children in the Indian households. Important aspect is that since the research was conducted Microsoft's digital advertising group they are most likely to promote those results which show their solutions in good light. Another aspect is that sample size is only 10000 people.