This festive season, over 100,000 Amazon-enabled local shops, kiranas and neighbourhood stores from across India are geared up to serve customers and celebrate with them, the Company announced today. More than 20,000 offline retailers, kiranas and local shops from “Local Shops on Amazon” program will be participating in their first “Great Indian Festival” and will be catering to customers in their cities and across India, selling everything from daily essentials to large appliances and from home décor items to gifts and fresh flowers.
This festive season we are focused on helping our sellers and other MSME partners grow their business and bounce back from the recent challenges.We hope that this Great Indian Festival will bring them growth and success as they get ready to serve millions of customers across India.
The Local Shops program is seeing remarkable response from retailers from across India and has scaled rapidly in just 5 months; with more than 40% of the sellers coming from outside the top 10 cities. The success of the “Local Shops on Amazon” program underlines Amazon India’s commitment to work closely with the vast network of neighborhood stores across India, integrating ecommerce into their operations through focused initiatives such as Amazon Easy, I Have Space, and Amazon Pay Smart Stores.
Local Shops on Amazon is a new program that was launched in April this year to help bring offline retailers, kiranas and local shops online. The program has scaled rapidly within 5 months of launch and now has more than 20,000 retailers in 400 cities. Today, thousands of offline retailers from Meerut to Ludhiana, Saharanpur to Surat, Indore to Ernakulum and Kanchipuram are part of the Local Shops on Amazon program. Local Shops on Amazon offer a wide range of products including Fresh flowers, Home and Kitchen products, Furniture, Electronics, Books and Toys amongst others. This festive season Amazon.in customers will be able to shop from some of their favourite local stores in their cities, get deliveries the same/next day and also benefit from value added services offered by these stores.
Amazon Easy enables assisted shopping experience for new to e-commerce customers. They can place an order on Amazon.in with guided assistance from the store staff and pick up the order from the store or get it delivered at their doorstep. An upgraded ‘Amazon Easy’ store format has recently been launched offering a touch & feel product experience and integrating multiple Amazon services through a single touchpoint. The first such store is now operational in Bengaluru. The upgraded format stores will soon be expanded to other parts of the country.
Amazon Pay Smart Store is currently enabling 15,000+ neighbourhood shops to provide a contactless shopping experience to their customers. With Amazon Pay Smart Store, customers can simply scan the store’s QR code using the Amazon app to explore the products available in the store. After selecting the products, they wish to buy they can check out with Amazon Pay, which gives them a choice of using UPI, balance, or credit or debit cards. Customers can on-the-spot convert a transaction into an EMI, and avail exciting rewards from their banks or through Amazon Pay.
Amazon I Have Space: Ahead of the festive season, Amazon has also strengthened its flagship ‘I Have Space’ (IHS) delivery program, now comprising of more than 28,000 neighborhood 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.
'Looking forward to the festive season'
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 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.
