Amit Agarwal, Amazon India, talks about the evolution of Amazon over the past eight years in India and its pledge to bring one million small businesses online in the next four years. On customers’ side, it wants to improve their livelihoods. Edited excerpts:
Amit Agarwal: …It is a relief to see the cases go down but the situation is clearly not normal so I would encourage everybody to be safe, get vaccinated and take care of themselves. At Amazon I would say we actually just finished eight years in June, so it has been a very fulfilling journey, customers and sellers rely on us more than ever before. It is very humming to see how starting from a small website just selling books in ten cities, hundred sellers we have come a long way. At this moment pretty much the whole organisation has been very pivoted and focussed on keeping our employees safe, serving our customers and small businesses during these tough times and also doing a bit to help the community and the government to come out of this crisis and at least get to the part where as you said we can reboot our economy. So while we have been very focussed on community efforts –whether it is transporting medical equipment, helping with vaccinations, helping small businesses with insurance and so on. On the business side our focus remains the same – how do you make sure that we offer to our customers what they are looking for, offer them great value, empower our sellers so that they can reduce their cost of operations and make it possible for customers to get what they are looking for fast and reliably. So at this moment our focus is very much on bringing our small, medium businesses back on line. They have been disrupted.
We have launched several programmes. We have launched this programme called local shops and you would see us grow that considerably this year where we are allowing offline stores to use Amazon as their online presence so that they can get orders from their locality customers -online through Amazon. Grocery is very important category. We have seen customers move online for their grocery needs. We are very excited how they have responded to our service and we actually have combined our fresh and pantry service into one single service where customers can get fast to our delivery and they can also save money on multi-packs, large packs shipped next day. Prime has been doing extremely well. We just release our Family Man 2 season and customers responded very positively. Through Prime, we continue to entertain our customers. We are offering them free fast delivery so they should see lot more value through Prime. Payments is a big priority for us as customers moved online, they are using Amazon pay. We have more than five million offline stores that accept Amazon payments. You can pretty much book your tickets, pay your bills, send money to anyone, buy digital gold, all your daily life can be managed digitally so very excited about that. We are very excited that customers can shop Amazon in five languages so we continue to expand that so that we can get more and more customers in the country are shopping with us. We are very excited that overall our focus continues to be in empowering small businesses– so that they can serve customers.
ET Now: Let us start with small businesses including the initiative of bringing kirana’s online in the sense of using them as fulfilment centres of sorts. Are you going to increase investments for small and medium businesses, we did see an announcement to that effect last year but like you said it is being disrupted?
Yes, so first of all we actually offer variety of services to small business and not just the ability for them to act as logistics partners. What we are very excited that Covid allowed the right kind of businesses to embrace technology and— think about supplementing their offline footfalls with online presence, so we have actually launched a product called local shops at Amazon that allows any small store out there, it does not have to be kirana store, any store a boutique store, a flower store you name it and they can use Amazon as their online presence so that customers can simply go to Amazon –shop the store and get products delivered to their home. This provides a very important home delivery through amazon capability for a small stores in your locality and we have seen this grow rapidly in just last year. Nearly 3 lakh small businesses joined Amazon to sell naturally and of them 50000 plus were just local stores and more than 75,000 of the small businesses that have joined in local languages so it also brings local languages online.
In addition to selling online, as you said they could use Amazon to be a logistics partner, deliver packages to customers and increase their income using Amazon. We have more than 1.5 lakh small stores that are part of our network and very recently we pledged to bring one million or 10 lakh small businesses online in the next four years. We are completely committed with the pledge, overall we have pledged that we are going to get 10 million or one crore small businesses online by 2025 of which we estimate 10% or 10 lakh of them would be the small stores around you, by stores we mean not just kirana stores but all sorts of stores.
ET Now: This is now the new hot bed of competition between the ecommerce giants whether it is you, whether it is flipkart, whether it is JioMart this is it the fight for the kirana –the fight to go into the smaller towns as well and therefore the need to go vernacular to go in more languages as well?
Our approach right from the first day has been very simple- use technology to empower businesses of all sizes, help them reduce cost of operations so that they can offer great value to customers and build infrastructure through fulfilment centres and logistics so that customers can get products delivered faster reliably. We have not just enabled this at a local scale or regional scale but have done it at a global scale so you can have a manufacturer sitting in Jaipur and using Amazon to sell products to customers sitting in Australia, United States and you name it to 200 countries and we have been doing it since last eight years and the success speaks for itself.
In the last eight years we have digitised more than 2.5 million small businesses, 8 lakhs of them are selling on Amazon and then we have people who are part of our logistics network, people who are selling globally, people who are being our partners. We are very excited by the momentum the most transacted, the most trusted marketplace out there offering the largest section of customers and we will continue to offset with customers and do what we have been doing all this while.
ET Now: How has Covid changed the behaviour of the Indian consumer?
The most distinct change I would say is more customers and more businesses are looking to online for their lives and livelihoods. Speed and convenience comes later, it is just the ability for you to embrace technology, embrace online as a key channel. We are seeing more customers from the remotest part of the country using online service like Amazon in many languages that we are offering, even in categories such as grocery where you would kind of wait for a certain degree of adoption. So, the rate at which new customers are coming and shopping has definitely gone up.
On the business side, we have seen the number of businesses wanting to embrace technology and come online increased by at least 50% so if I look at the last 12 to 15 months of trajectory, more than three lakh small businesses have come online on Amazon, which is phenomenal in a small period of time and not just businesses who are trying to sell nationally, local stores are embracing technology and they are trying to supplement their offline footfalls by an online presence.
The second trend I would just say is exports. Businesses in India are realising that they need to serve the global market. Just last year Amazon enabled one billion dollars in exports from manufacturers in India across the customers worldwide. We have crossed three billion in our lifetime, it took us three years for the first billion, 18 months for the next billion and this billion has come in just 12 months. Hence, there is a distinct trend of manufacturers and brands in India wanting to go global. So these are some of structural trends, that are going to propel us faster towards a digital economy, towards digital businesses, more robust digital businesses and towards Make in India going global.
ET Now: Today, if I were to see the things that Amazon offered during the coronavirus whether it is pharmacy deliveries that you got into, you started looking at entertainment more seriously, sports also for that matter– we heard about the streaming rights, ed tech, is Amazon going to be a super app in India, is it already a super app?
Well, we do not really think about these catch phrases out there. Our mission is very simple; we want to improve the customers’ daily lives and digitally empower livelihoods out there. From that perspective, we try for customers to improve their experience, provide them great selection, great value and convenience in anything that they find lacking. Yes, you can use Amazon to send money to your friends and relatives, pay your rent, pay your bills, buy movie tickets, buy travel tickets, you can watch videos on mini TV which we just recently launched a month ago, free ad supported TV on Amazon or just sign up for Prime, you can get your grocery delivered, buy anything that you like, to even get your medicines delivered to you so in that sense we do like to make sure that we are improving daily lives of our customers and we continue to do that. We want to make sure that customers can save time, save money and get more convenience in their daily lives.
