Dive Brief:

• Snapdeal, India’s second-largest e-commerce site after Flipkart and ahead of fast-moving number three Amazon, is attracting new investments in recent months.

• The company received $200 million in new investment from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in Canada, just six months after obtaining $500 million in funds from Alibaba, SoftBank, and Foxconn.

• Snapdeal says it sells more than 30 million products from some 275,000 sellers, selling to more than 6,000 Indian municipalities. Flipkart also says it sells 30 million products and that it has 45 million registered users. Amazon is widely seen as catching up, but doesn’t release such figures; the American company says it was India’s most visited retail site in October 2015, TechCrunch reports.

Dive Insight:

India presents retailers with immense growth opportunities, including some advantages that can’t be found in China. The potential rests in the country’s demographics—a growing middle class that includes a large young, mobile-first generation.

English is an official language in India, and serves as a common language for many of the sub-populations there. Language isn’t the barrier for businesses doing business there, including retailers selling to Indian consumers. And the most widely used social media platforms in India are the very ones that are widely used in the U.S.; in fact, India gives Facebook its second-largest membership base, after the U.S. That means brands have one less barrier to bust through when reaching Indian consumers.

It’s no wonder, then, that Flipkart and Snapdeal, along with other e-commerce and m-commerce retail and payment ventures, are attracting healthy investments from many quarters.

Competition is fierce, and all these marketplaces must still tackle some of the logistical headaches found in India, which make fulfillment and delivery difficult, especially to more far-flung areas.

“We see these investments as a continuing endorsement of Snapdeal’s strategy to build India’s most reliable and frictionless commerce ecosystem,” Snapdeal CFO Anup Vikal said in a statement. “We continue to make targeted investments in building internal and external capabilities that will enable us to consistently deliver optimal experience for the millions of buyers and sellers who transact daily on Snapdeal.”