NE BUSINESS BUREAU
BENGALURU, OCT 4
As India gears up for the festive season ahead, Jeff Bezos Amazon’s India business on Sunday said that more than 1 lakh “Amazon-enabled” local shops, kiranas, and neighbourhood stores will be serving customers this year. Over 20,000 offline retailers, kiranas, and local shops from Local Shops on Amazon programme will be participating for the first time in the company’s biggest annual sale Great Indian Festival.
Local Shops on Amazon, which allows sellers to cater to customers in their local area and deliver products in up to two days, “has scaled rapidly in just 5 months; with more than 40 percent of the sellers coming from outside the top 10 cities,” Amazon said in a statement.
The programme is among a string of initiatives by Amazon such as Amazon Easy (to help local entrepreneurs set up stores), I Have Space (for kirana stores with additional storage space for Amazon packages and sufficient manpower to deliver them in two-three km radius of their stores), Amazon Pay Smart Stores (to enable digital storefront, contactless payments, and reward coupons to customers), etc., catering to micro and small business sellers.
“This festive season we are focused on helping our sellers and other MSME partners grow their business and bounce back from the recent challenges…The integration of Amazon’s programs with 100,000+ ubiquitous neighbourhood stores – for selling online, to help customers buy online, to make deliveries and enable contactless payments – is a testament of the adaptability and inventiveness of Indian entrepreneurs,” said Manish Tiwary, VP – Amazon India.
Ahead of the festive season, Amazon has also strengthened its flagship ‘I Have Space’ (IHS) delivery program, now comprising of more than 28,000 neighbourhood and kirana stores in close to 350 cities. Under the ‘I Have Space’ program, Amazon India partners with local store owners to deliver products to customers within a 2 to 4 kilometers radius of their store, allowing them to supplement their regular income and generate more footfalls in their stores.
Sakshi Khandelwal who runs an Electronics store named Shiv Electronics in North West Delhi recently joined the Local Shops on Amazon program. About her experience, she says, “Since joining Local Shops on Amazon, we have started selling to customers beyond where our retail shop is located. We have seen our online business grow month on month, but more importantly, this program offers us greater control over the inventory and delivery of the products. We started the year with three employees, and today we have 10 team members. With the festive season approaching, we are hiring more delivery executives and stocking up our inventory as we expect a high number of customer orders.”
I have been an I Have Space Partner since 2017, and it has been a blessing for me and my family. Especially during the lockdown, there was a lot of uncertainty around us. We did not know when we would be able to open our shops and how we would manage our expenses until then. However, because of my earnings from the IHS program, I could continue to support and provide for my family during this challenging time. Seeing the benefits of the program, last month, my brother became an IHS partner as well”, says Harish, owner of Bhavya Tailoring Collections in Baroda.
