With a mission to enabling small local businesses to benefit from its e-commerce platform, Amazon is partnering with local stores in India to let them sell their products through its e-commerce platform in India. This new initiative is called ‘Local Shops on Amazon’.
This program will help customers discover products from local shops in their city. It will enable offline retailers with little to no prior experience of selling products online to list products on Amazon’s website.
Local shops of any size can be part of the initiative using their existing mechanism to deliver. Shop owners choose the areas where they can possibly deliver products the same day or the next day. They can also choose to work with Amazon to fulfil their orders and expand their areas. With the Amazon Delivery App, local shops can provide accurate delivery updates to customers as well as Amazon. And, just like the regular Amazon orders, customers can track their orders.
This will be a win-win for both the customers and the local store owners. As a customer, you get access to a greater selection of products and local shops get transform as digital stores. As a part of the launch, Amazon India is pledging Rs 10 Crores to scale the program.
(1/2) Happy to announce “Local Shops on Amazon”, a program enabling local retailers & shopkeepers of all sizes to leverage Amazon’s technology & grow their footprint digitally. After a successful pilot with 5000+ stores, we are pledging Rs10 Crores to scale the program.April 23, 2020
In the last six months, Amazon India started the pilot program with over 5,000 local shops onboard from over 100 cities. The retailers came from metro cities as well as tier 1 and tier 2 cities.
The pilot program was held across cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Surat, Indore Lucknow, Saharanpur, Faridabad, Kota, Varanasi amongst others. It included sellers from different categories like Kitchen, Home, Furniture, Apparel, Automotive, Beauty, Electronics, Sports, Grocery, Lawn & Garden, Books, Toys, Jewellery Appliances etc.
Furthermore, the local shops can sign up for Amazon’s existing programs that help them earn additional income like ‘I Have Space’ to act as delivery and pickup points, and ‘Amazon Easy’ to offer expanded selection to their walk-in customers.
During the time of corona and lockdown, this can come in really handy. Customers will get to know which product is in stock and which is not. Also, ordering from the app will completely avoid crowd gathering.
