NEW DELHI: One in three smartphones were sold through e-commerce channels in 2015 in India, the second largest smartphone market in the world in terms of number of users, said analysts at Counterpoint Research in a report on Thursday.Research found that Flipkart sold about half of about 31 million smartphones sold online last year, during which a total of 100 million smartphones were sold in the market.Lenovo, Samsung Xiaomi and Asus, make the top 5 smartphone brands by market share in that order, and the lot captured three fourth of the ecommerce sales last year. Meanshile. Flipkart, Amazon & Snapdeal , together accounting for almost 90% of the online smartphone sales volumes.“This trend (lower entry barrier by ecommerce players) has not only allowed newer brands to offer attractive pricing but also when coupled with attractive discounts, cashbacks, marketing support from e-commerce platforms has driven e-commerce channel to become one of the important channels to distribute and sell mobile phones in India,” Counterpoint Research Senior Analyst, Tarun Pathak comments.One in four smartphones sold online was a Lenovo-Motorola phone, which gave the brand a 24.7% share of the online smartphone sales, followed by Samsung at No 2 which clocked 17.8% for 2015. Meanwhile, Micromax was the largest Indian brand followed by Intex and Lava , in terms of online smartphone sales, but India’s largest home bred brand was No 3 with 16.1% share of the online smartphone sales. Xiaomi and Asus followed up at No 4 and No 5 positions, with 8.9% and 4.5% shares, respectively.The online sales spurt for Lenovo pushed it to the number three spot in India’s smartphone segment. The new entrants mostly Chinese brands together captured almost half of the online sales segment.Flipkart led online sales, but Amazon also benefitted from the inventory-led model and tripled its smartphone sales over the period of twelve months.“We believe the competition will intensify in 2016 as players such as PayTM, Shopclues and others are aggressively promoting their platforms and a greater shift towards marketplace models,” analysts at Counterpoint added.The recent announcement from government on the new policy which allows 100% FDI in ecommerce marketplace to attract more foreign investment will boost the competition between online marketplaces.Research also found that $100-$150 (Rs 6,000 to Rs 10,000) range was the one of the sweet spots for online sales, with nearly 33% of all smartphones sold fell in this bracket. Further, about 75% of the smartphones sold online in the October to December quarter were LTE enabled.Since only 40% of mobile phone users own a smartphone, it makes the Indian market very attractive for hundreds of brands to enter every year and generate scale, compared to other developed and mature economies. With advent of e-commerce platforms such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, PayTM and others, the barriers to scale for new entrants have been reduced as they cut out the middle-men.However, the country remains a challenging market to scale from offline distribution and go-to-market perspective.