Sellers on Amazon’s Indian site have exported their products worth $1 billion and Amazon has an ambitious plan to take this to the $5 billion level in 4 years. This came from local merchants selling to international markets through Amazon, reports Economic Times.
With its operations spread across several countries, it takes little effort to add the Indian products that find easy acceptability in the international markets. Textiles, apparel, home furnishing and pharmaceuticals are some product lines that have been exported from India.
This was part of its Global Selling Program, which it launched in 2015 to help more small and medium-sized businesses by giving them access to Amazon's worldwide customer base of 300 million active users. AS per the report, there are 50,000 exporters live on Amazon's platform who do B2C and B2B orders across the globe.
Amazon claims it is also working with the government in formulating policy changes, leveraging on the ‘Make in India’ campaign the government is promoting. Amazon confirms that the government too is putting its best foot forward by bringing down the documentation and other infrastructure creation where needed and so on.
Now that Amazon’s US rival Walmart has entered the Indian ecommerce scene, the exporters in the product lines identified above are getting orders from the US company.
All these developments have to be viewed from the perspective of the Indian government’s resolve to double the country’s share of exports from 1.6% to 3.4% and the contribution through the ecommerce firms to boost exports particularly through the small & medium enterprises. The country is expecting to clock a record exports figure this year crossing the $300 billion mark.
The role of these large US companies has been that they have trained these Indian companies to adapt to international requirements both in terms of the quality and in getting familiar with the requirements in handling exports.