NEW DELHI: As India gears up for the festive season, e-commerce major Amazon India has announced its annual Great Indian festival to commence from 17 October. As usual, the Amazon Prime members will have access to discounts and offers a day in advance, 16 October.
This year, lakhs of small and medium businesses (SMBs) are offering unique selection to customers to rebuild and accelerate their businesses in tough times. Customers across the country will have the opportunity to shop for unique products from thousands of Amazon sellers under various programs such as local shops, Amazon Launchpad, Amazon Saheli, and Amazon Karigar and enjoy deals/offers extended by lakhs of small businesses.
Over 20,000 offline retailers, kiranas, and local shops from local shops on Amazon programme are participating for the first time in the company’s biggest annual sale. Local shops on Amazon, which allow sellers to cater to customers in their local area and deliver products in upto two days have scaled rapidly in just five months; with more than 40 per cent of the sellers coming from outside the top 10 cities.
Commenting on the announcement, Amazon India VP Manish Tiwary said, “This year’s ‘Great Indian Festival’ is an opportunity for our sellers and partners to reach millions of customers across the country. Our sellers are excited and expect this to help them in accelerating their business. For our customers, our aim is to help them find everything they need during the festive season and deliver it safely to them.”
Sellers on Amazon.in are optimistic about the festive season. As per a recent survey by Nielsen, more than 85 per cent of SMBs sellers are expecting to reach out to new customers and witness an increase in sales. More than 74 per cent of sellers are optimistic about the recovery of business and 78 per cent are positive about the increase in visibility of their products.
Customers can look forward to over 900 new product launches from top brands. They can shop for deals every day across a wide range of categories like consumer durables, electronic gadgets, kitchen appliances, fashion and apparel, and many others. The brand has added new languages- English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada into the app for customers to shop.
Tiwari told the media that their objective for this festive season is to help the MSME sector to grow their business and bounce back from the recent challenges, he shared that the pandemic has disrupted the consumer behaving buying pattern, “We have seen small businesses who were shy from doing their business online, pandemic in a way has helped them to implement it, and innovate the business. Today, small retailers want to grow their business on Amazon, and take benefits out of it.”
The etailer has gone ahead to launch a campaign in multiple languages to connect with the audiences.
The etailer has created multiple stores around Diwali, Pujo, IPL and others to help customers shop more products of their need and choice. This also includes a wedding store for the forthcoming wedding season. Customers can now use voice to quickly narrow their search for products, top deals, including Alexa-exclusive deals, or just ask Alexa on their Amazon Shopping app (Android only) as well, to pay utility bills, load money in Amazon Pay, or navigate to the Small Business Store, Fun Zone or the Great Indian Bazaar.
Amazon has ramped up its delivery infrastructure adding close to 200 delivery stations and added tens of thousands of delivery partners to its network. Amazon.in has expanded its fulfilment footprint with more than 60 centres in 15 states offering a storage capacity of over 32 million cubic feet to serve customers in the farthest parts of the country. Further, it has announced 5 new sort centres and expansion of 8 existing sort centres across the country to strengthen fulfilment capacity.
According to experts, online festive season sales will generate higher order volume and value for e-commerce companies on the back of the Covid2019-induced shift in shopping patterns for a vast number of consumers not just in metros but largely in non-metro cities from physical retail to online retail. This would also likely help online sellers to multiply their sales following the negligible to zero growth in business during the lockdown.
As per market research firm RedSeer, growth in shoppers this year will be driven by ‘Bharat’ shoppers with 40-50 per cent of 45-50 million shoppers expected to come from Tier-II cities and beyond, 20-25 per cent from Tier-I cities, and 30-35 per cent from metros. The growth in shoppers will be around 70 per cent — from 28 million in 2019 to expected 45-50 million this year in contrast to only around 40 per cent from 20 million in 2018 festive days to 28 million in 2019.
