Amazon to ship India logistics initiative to European markets

Global e-commerce giant Amazon.com is planning to replicate some of its Indian innovations in global markets.

To start with, the Seattle-based company is looking at piloting seller service EasyShip, developed in the Indian market for local sellers, in the European market in a few months. Amazon, which entered India with a marketplace model in 2013, had launched EasyShip in 2014.

EasyShip is an assisted shipping service wherein a seller can use Amazon’s logistics services to have its orders shipped straight from its own warehouses.

This is aimed to help the sellers improve their delivery, and also scale and grow their online business cost-effectively.

According to Amazon, thanks to EasyShip, sellers have seen a 60-70 per cent increase in their daily sales in over 30 Indian cities.

Gopal Pillai, Director - Seller Services, Amazon India, told BusinessLine : “India is leading the competition globally and we have witnessed phenomenal growth.

“EasyShip was a very interesting initiative that was experimented in the Indian market in 2014 and this has resulted in about 85 per cent of our sellers using it to improve their business. We are taking this to the European market.”

The move comes a month after Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos praised the Indian team for its inventions and innovative ideas to increase the seller base in the country.

He also mentioned that India is an example of a market where the company has been able to build services and initiatives that can be replicated globally.

Referring to the marketplace model in India, where third-party sellers can sell to consumers on its platform, Bezos said the company had launched India-specific initiatives like Amazon Chai Cart, Amazon Tatkal, EasyShip and SellerFlex to get more local sellers on board.

These initiatives have helped Amazon’s seller base increase 250 per cent year-on-year from a mere 100 in June 2013 to 85,000 at present.

“We are also exploring other initiatives like SellerFlex to launch in markets outside India,” Pillai said, adding that the company plans to “double-down” on the current services this year.

SellerFlex, which was started last year, allows sellers to deliver their products directly from their warehouses, rather than routing it through Amazon.

For the seller, this reduces the cost of shipping inventory to Amazon’s fulfilment centres, for storage and reverse logistics (returns). Amazon started the initiative with 11 SellerFlex sites in six cities, and scaled it up to 21 centres in 20 more cities.

All these initiatives have paid off for Amazon, as it saw it revenue grow 27 per cent in the first quarter of 2015. Pillai added that while the e-commerce industry grew 67 per cent, Amazon India grew four times that.

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