MAM
Republic Day Sales 2026 reveal how India shops now: Unicommerce Analysis
NEW DELHI: If Republic Day Sales were once about loud discounts and one-off splurges, 2026 tells a calmer, more confident story. India’s e-commerce market is growing up and doing so quietly, steadily and far beyond the big cities.
An analysis by Unicommerce, based on over 27 million order items processed on its Uniware platform during the 2025 and 2026 Republic Day sale periods, highlights four clear signals shaping how Indians are shopping today.
The biggest surprise came from smaller cities. Tier 3 markets accounted for nearly 40 per cent of total order items, with volumes growing over 19 per cent year-on-year. Towns such as Kolar, Rohtak, Kamrup, Ernakulam and Khordha led the surge, proving that e-commerce’s next chapter is being written well beyond the metros.
Food and wellness purchases showed especially strong traction. Healthy food volumes more than doubled in Tier 2 cities, while Tier 3 markets contributed around 43 per cent of all food and beverage orders, underlining how online shopping has become part of everyday life in smaller towns.
Growth this year was driven less by higher bills and more by people buying more often. Order volumes rose 16.9 per cent year-on-year, while gross merchandise value grew 11.9 per cent, pointing to repeat consumption as the real engine.
FMCG and agriculture products recorded nearly 80 per cent growth, while beauty and wellness grew about 53 per cent. Shoppers stocked up on dry fruits, millet-based foods, healthy snacks and organic staples, alongside face serums, body washes and grooming essentials. The message is clear: e-commerce is now about routines, not rushes.
Speed continued to shape buying decisions. Quick commerce led growth with a 25 per cent jump in order volumes, followed by brand-owned websites at 23 per cent. Marketplaces still handled the largest share of orders, but brands leaned heavily on automation to manage inventory, route orders and respond to customers in real time.
Artificial intelligence quietly worked behind the scenes to turn interest into orders. Unicommerce’s Convertway platform powered over 2.5 million customer messages across SMS, WhatsApp and RCS, helping brands lift conversion rates during peak days.
Its AI voice agent, Catalyst, made more than 1.2 lakh calls to assist with last-mile order completion. The result was over ten times the revenue compared to the cost incurred, turning AI into one of the most efficient tools of the sale season.
Taken together, these four signals point to a shift in India’s e-commerce story. Growth in 2026 is being fuelled by repeat buying, sharper execution, deeper reach into smaller cities, faster fulfilment and smarter use of AI. The era of noisy spikes is giving way to something more durable and distinctly more mature.
MAM
Nielsen launches co-viewing pilot to sharpen TV measurement
Super Bowl pilot to refine how shared TV audiences are counted
MUMBAI: Nielsen is taking a fresh stab at one of television’s oldest blind spots: how many people are actually watching the same screen. The audience-measurement giant on February 4 unveiled a co-viewing pilot that uses wearable devices to better capture shared viewing, starting with America’s biggest broadcast stage.
The trial begins with Super Bowl LX on NBC on February 8, 2026, before extending to other high-profile live sports and entertainment events in the first half of the year. The goal is simple but commercially potent: count viewers more accurately, especially during live spectacles that pull families and friends to one screen.
The new approach leans on Nielsen’s proprietary wearable meters, wrist-worn devices that resemble smartwatches. These passively capture audio signatures from TV content, logging exposure to shows, films and live events without requiring viewers to sign in or self-report. In theory, fewer clicks, fewer lapses, better data.
Karthik Rao, Nielsen’s ceo, cast the move as part of a broader measurement push. He said the company’s task is to keep pushing accuracy as clients invest heavily in live programming that draws mass audiences. The co-viewing pilot, he added, builds on upgrades such as Big Data + Panel measurement, out-of-home expansion, live-streaming metrics and wearable-based tracking.
Co-viewing is not new territory for Nielsen, which has long tried to estimate how many people sit before a single set. What is new is the heavier integration of wearables and passive detection to reduce reliance on active inputs from panel homes.
For now, the pilot comes with caveats. Co-viewing estimates from the trial will not be folded into Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel ratings, which remain the industry’s trading currency. Instead, pilot findings will be shared with clients a few weeks after final Big Data + Panel ratings are delivered. Clients may disclose those findings publicly.
More impact data will follow later this year. Full integration into Nielsen’s marketing-intelligence suite is slated as a longer-term play, with a target of bringing co-viewing into currency measurement for the 2026–2027 season. This is only phase one, with further co-viewing enhancements planned beyond 2026 and additional timelines to be announced.
The push fits a wider pattern. Nielsen has in recent years expanded big-data integration, adopted first-party data for live-streaming measurement and broadened out-of-home tracking. It also positions itself as the reference point for streaming metrics through products such as The Gauge and the Nielsen Streaming Top 10.
In a market where billions of ad dollars hinge on decimal points, counting who is in the room matters. If Nielsen can pin down shared viewing, the humble sofa could become prime measurement real estate. The race to count every eyeball just found a new wrist to watch.
Brands
Delhivery chairman Deepak Kapoor, independent director Saugata Gupta quit board
Gurugram: Delhivery’s boardroom is being reset. Deepak Kapoor, chairman and independent director, has resigned with effect from April 1 as part of a planned board reconstitution, the logistics company said in an exchange filing. Saugata Gupta, managing director and chief executive of FMCG major Marico and an independent director on Delhivery’s board, has also stepped down.
Kapoor exits after an eight-year stint that included steering the company through its 2022 stock-market debut, a period that saw Delhivery transform from a venture-backed upstart into one of India’s most visible logistics platforms. Gupta, who joined the board in 2021, departs alongside him, marking a simultaneous clearing of two senior independent seats.
“Deepak and Saugata have been instrumental in our process of recognising the need for and enabling the reconstitution of the board of directors in line with our ambitious next phase of growth,” said Sahil Barua, managing director and chief executive, Delhivery. The statement frames the exits less as departures and more as deliberate succession, a boardroom shuffle timed to the company’s evolving scale and strategy.
The resignations arrive amid broader governance recalibration. In 2025, Delhivery appointed Emcure Pharmaceuticals whole-time director Namita Thapar, PB Fintech founder and chairman Yashish Dahiya, and IIM Bangalore faculty member Padmini Srinivasan as independent directors, signalling a tilt towards consumer, fintech and academic expertise at the board level.
Kapoor’s tenure spanned Delhivery’s most defining years, rapid network expansion, public listing and the push towards profitability in a bruising logistics market. Gupta’s presence brought FMCG and brand-scale perspective during a period when ecommerce volumes and last-mile delivery economics were being rewritten.
The twin exits, effective from the new financial year, underscore a familiar corporate rhythm: founders consolidate, veterans rotate out, and fresh voices are ushered in to script the next chapter. In India’s hyper-competitive logistics race, even the boardroom does not stand still.
MAM
Meta appoints Anuvrat Rao as APAC head of commerce partnerships
At Locofy.ai, Rao helped convert a three-year free beta into a paid engine, clocking 1,000 subscribers and 15 enterprise clients within ten days of launch in September 2024. The low-code startup, backed by Accel and top tech founders, is famed for turning designs into production-ready code using proprietary large design models.
Before that, Rao founded generative AI venture 1Bstories, which was acquired by creative AI platform Laetro in mid-2024, where he briefly served as managing director for APAC. Alongside operating roles, he has been an active investor and advisor since 2020, backing startups such as BotMD, Muxy, Creator plus, Intellect, Sealed and CricFlex through a creator-economy-led thesis.
Rao spent over eight years at Google, holding senior partnership roles across search, assistant, chrome, web and YouTube in APAC, and earlier cut his teeth in strategy consulting at OC&C in London and investment finance at W. P. Carey in Europe and the US.
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