A day after Facebook and Reliance Jio announced their partnership bring over three crore grocery stores online, Amazon India has announced the launch of its program ‘Local Shops on Amazon’.
This comes after Jeff Bezos, in January 2020, committed an additional investment of $1 billion in India to digitally enable 10 million micro, small, and medium businesses in the country by 2025, including artisans, manufacturers, retailers, and local shops.
The program, which was piloted for six months with over 5000 local shops and retailers from 100+ cities in India aims to help customers discover products from local shops in their city online. This in turn helps shopkeepers supplement their footfalls with a digital presence and expand beyond their normal catchment, claims Amazon.
As part of the six-month pilot program, Amazon India had retailers from top metros as well as tier 1 and tier 2 cities. This included Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Surat, Indore Lucknow, Saharanpur, Faridabad, Kota, Varanasi amongst others. The program pilot included sellers from different categories such as kitchen, home, furniture, apparel, automotive, beauty, electronics, sports, grocery, lawn and garden, books, toys, jewellery appliances etc.
How it works:
Amazon says that local shops and retailers of any size from any part of India, across categories can join the ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ program, using their existing delivery mechanisms to deliver to customers faster.
The program allows shopkeepers to choose the areas where they can deliver on the same day or next with pin-code level granularity.
According to Amazon, they can also leverage the trust with customers in their locality by providing additional value-added services like product demonstration, installation support, easy customizations, and device data transfer, among others.
“In case they want to expand their serviceable areas within the city or nationally, they can choose to work with Amazon to fulfil their orders,” Amazon said in a statement.
Local Shops can use the newly launched ‘Amazon Delivery App’ to provide delivery updates to customers and Amazon, and all shipments are tracked on a daily basis on key metrics to ensure customers get what they were promised.
Some of the stores that have been delivering during the pilot include Sangeetha Mobiles (Mobile Phones, Bengaluru), Adith Electronics (Consumer Electronics, Hyderabad), Arya Organic Products (Grocery Consumables, Bengaluru), Delhi Electronics Plaza (Consumer Electronics, Delhi), mysleepyhead (Mattresses, Krishnagiri), Green Soul (Furniture, Mumbai), , Comfort Bedding (Bedding & Mattresses, Delhi), Shoe Mistri (Shoes Care, Delhi), Electro Kart (Consumer Electronics, Delhi NCR), Madhuram (Electronics, Ahmedabad) The Mattress Hub (Mattresses, Delhi NCR), Electronics Shoppe (Consumer Electronics, Delhi NCR), Raw Pressery (Beverages, Mumbai), Weguarantee (Grocery and Healthcare, Lucknow) amongst others.
Reliance Industries announced on Wednesday that Facebook is picking up a 9.9% stake in Reliance Jio for Rs 43,574 crore. As part of the deal, Jio Platforms and Reliance Retail entered into a commercial partnership with WhatsApp.
“In the very near future, JioMart – Jio’s digital new commerce platform, and WhatsApp – will empower nearly 3 crore small Indian Kirana shops to digitally transact with every customer in their neighbourhood. This means all of you can order and get faster delivery of day-to-day items, from nearby local shops. At the same time small Kiranas can grow their businesses and create new employment opportunities using digital technologies,” RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani said in a video message post the deal announcement.