A day after the mega announcement of Facebook investing $5.7 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms, which would involved the two companies coming together to enable commerce through neighbourhood stores, Amazon India made another push to integrate with local retailers to propel its offline strategy.
Amazon said on Thursday said it was growing its ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ initiative to enable offline stores to do more business through their platform. And the company expects more brick-and-mortar stores to leverage the online marketplace as they rejig their models once the country is back up post the Covid-19 induced lockdown.
Gopal Pillai, Vice President, Amazon India Marketplace, said that with offline store footfalls expected to remain low even after the lockdown ends, Amazon could play a critical role in helping grow their businesses.
(1/2) Happy to announce “Local Shops on Amazon”, a program enabling local retailers & shopkeepers of all sizes to l… https://t.co/z2hoKLEOY9
— Gopal Pillai (@GopalPillai) 1587643986000
He announced an additional Rs 10 crore investment to sign up, train and help businesses catalogue products.“We believe this programme is placed in a way that it can play a critical role in bringing back the traffic for the offline retailers without customers having to come out of their houses and visit a local shop,” Pillai said.
Amazon said that it had already signed up over 5,000 offline shops, including large retailers such as Tata’s Croma, as sellers on its platform. It added that retailers of all sizes and from various categories across electronics, food, fashion were part of the programme.
Offline stores will be allowed to ship orders themselves, ship it through third-party logistics or even through Amazon’s fulfilment channel. For local shipping, Amazon said customers can even opt for services such as installation wherever required, which will be done by the local store itself.
“When they list products, they can choose to deliver it themselves, because in a lot of cases local shops also offer value-added services,” added Pillai.
Amazon in January said it would invest $1 billion over the next five years to bring online 1 million micro, small and medium scale businesses. Local Shops on Amazon is part of that commitment.
Leave a Reply