After the pandemic, the number of first-time purchasers on Amazon Pantry and Fresh services have doubled with more than 60 per cent share of new customers coming from Tier 2 and 3 towns.

Earlier this year, the company integrated its Pantry and Fresh services in select cities. BusinessLine spoke to Siddharth Nambiar, Director, Category Management, Amazon about the growth of the company’s grocery business since then.

How has Amazon's grocery category been performing since the last year?

Grocery has been one of our fastest growing categories with our national delivery service that provides a selection of over 4 million products for customers across dry grocery, personal & health care, toys, baby products, pet products and personal care appliances. Covid-19 saw a spike in seller listings by 30 per cent in personal care, dry grocery and medical devices; first time purchasers more than doubled on Amazon Pantry + Fresh post Covid with more than 60% share of new customers coming from Tier 2/3 towns.

Amazon Fresh is available to customers in 14 cities currently- Bangalore, Delhi, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Ghaziabad, Noida, Ahmedabad, Mysore, Jaipur, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, and Kolkata. In the remaining 286 cities, customers will continue to get savings on dry grocery selection on Amazon Pantry.

How does Amazon overcome logistic challenges like bad roads or traffic in Indian cities to ensure the 2-hour delivery under Amazon Fresh?

We continue to invest in technology and innovations in logistics to ensure timely, reliable, and safe delivery of customer orders. We have built specialized infrastructure for Amazon Fresh, our ultra-fast delivery service of daily essentials and groceries. These buildings are designed to ensure safe storage of products and processing of customer orders with state-of-the-art equipment and technology. This includes dedicated storage infrastructure for dry grocery, fruits and vegetables and chilled and frozen items with specialized temperature-controlled rooms for each of these categories. We have also integrated gel pad freezers in delivery vehicles for last mile delivery of frozen and chilled items. This infrastructure along with best-in-class routing technology contributes to enabling timely and predictable deliveries.

At the same time, safety of our delivery partners continues to be our highest priority with special focus on road safety and multiple trainings to ensure they stay safe while delivering customer orders on time.

Can you share some grocery buying trends and purchase patterns seen in the festive season?

During the initial days of the Great Indian Festival, customers loved shopping for cooking essentials, where we saw a 3-fold spike in sales of staples like sugar, oil and atta among others. Home and personal care products were also in demand and saw a 3.5-fold spike. Also, while customers shopped for daily essentials including packaged goods, they also loved shopping for fruits and vegetables, with at least one in every two baskets carrying a fruit or vegetable. In addition to this, Amazon.in offered deals on thousands of products in Fresh & Pantry and over 90% of customers enjoyed shopping these deals.

We feel confident given the way our sellers are preparing for it, the infrastructure and support which we have created, this Diwali should be good for sellers and of course our consumers. Customers can look forward to shopping from a wide selection of products across categories from the comfort and safety of their homes.

How has been the traction received from Metros/Non-Metros in the past year? Has there been any significant shift in consumer demographic in the past year?

Over the last 15 to 18 months, we have seen a lot of customers move online. Nearly 65 per cent of customer orders and over 85 per cent of new customers on Amazon.in are from tier 2 and 3 cities. So, usually their first buy is a grocery product.

Now that we have integrated the propositions of convenience (Amazon Fresh) and value(Pantry) into a single store, we see a lot of potential in top 10 cities to attract shoppers with various shopping missions through our unified stores. In top cities in rest of India, we have seen a lot of adoption for online grocery post pandemic. We will continue to build on our presence and quality of service in these cities to further accelerate new customer adoption.

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