Amazon India plans to double its seller-focussed initiatives

E-commerce giant Amazon plans to double its seller related activities and initiatives in the Indian market next year to consolidate its position in the country.

The Seattle-based company has launched several seller-focussed initiatives this year to tap the 50 million Indian small and medium businesses.

Webinars These initiatives are targeted mostly at rural SMBs, which have no idea how to online marketing and e-commerce. Some of these are Seller University, where the company coaches sellers through webinars on how to sell online in various steps. The company is also looking at conducting these classes in more languages going forward. At present, it offers these programmes in 5 languages.

Fleet-on-streets is another such initiative that has been launched in 32 cities where the company sends its employees and freelancers on to the doorsteps of these sellers to make them aware about usage of mobile phones, apps to sell goods online or to help them conduct a photo-shoot or how to set up a store online. Then there are initiatives such as Chai-cart that creates awareness about e-commerce.

Besides, the company has recently launched a programme caller Seller Flex, which replicates its warehousing practices around inventory management, quality control, packaging and shipping at the facilities of its third-party sellers. These are small warehouses, owned by the sellers but powered by Amazon, where sellers would be allowed to have more control over the inventory and helps them faster delivery and cut down on shipping costs. It has so far converted 11 such warehouses in 6 cities and plans to open 4 more.

Gopal Pillai, Director — Seller Services, Amazon India, told BusinessLine that, “Sellers are an important part of the e-commerce ecosystem. Next year will be even more successful and a milestone year for us. We will be doubling up the pilot projects and continue to expand our seller base. Most of the initiatives would be on critical projects such as infrastructure, product management and mobile app.”

₹1,237-cr investment Amazon has been quite aggressive on expanding its seller base in the country. The company has already pumped in about ₹ 1,237 crore into its Seller Services arm even as it has committed over $2 billion to compete in the burgeoning e-commerce industry.

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos had earlier this year said that the company has witnessed “nothing like before” response in the Indian market. “After our first year in business, the response from customers and small and medium-size businesses in India has far surpassed our expectations.”

 Even as the ecommerce market is growing, the fight at present is to garner the maximum number of sellers as the commissions from the sellers accounts for their revenues. According to a Morgan Stanley report, the sector is expected to grow to $102 billion by 2020. While Amazon  has about one lakh sellers on its platform, rivals such as Snapdeal has 2 lakh sellers and Flipkart, which transformed into a marketplace from a pure play etailer last year, plans to have 1 lakh seller base by end this year. It has close to about 40,000 sellers at present.  Pillai further added that the initiatives by Amazon are already helping sellers to grow their business. Over 50 per cent of the sellers on its platform have reported a 10x kind of growth in their sales in the last two years.

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