Amazon India: Towards Customer Centricity

Amazon India is once again in the top five of BW Businessworld’s Most Respected Companies list based on high scores on parameters like ‘trustworthy leadership’, 'effective growth plan', and 'work culture', among others. Last year, it was ranked fifth in the same list.

For the uninitiated, Amazon in India may appear to be one single entity. But that is not the correct position. Of course, the most popular and customer-facing is Amazon Seller Services. It is the India online marketplace for the global e-commerce giant called Amazon. But it has several more businesses including Amazon Pay (India), the e-commerce firm’s digital payments arm, Amazon Internet Services, which sells cloud AWS cloud computing services in India, Amazon Data Services India providing IT and data hosting services to AWS India, Amazon Transportation Services and, of course, Amazon Retail India and Amazon Wholesale India. All put together, the entity Amazon in India clocked a combined revenue of over Rs 47,000 crore while narrowing its losses in a number of entitities for the financial year 2021-22. Operating in the private sector domain, the financial numbers reported here are provided by our knowledge partner TechSci Research and sourced from various reports available in the public domain.

The Amazon.in marketplace is operated by Amazon Seller Services, an affiliate of Amazon.com. Amazon.in seeks to build the most customer-centric online destination for customers to find and discover virtually anything they want to buy online by giving them more of what they want – vast selection, affordable prices, fast and reliable delivery, and a trusted and convenient experience; and provide sellers with a world-class e-commerce marketplace.

It has been a fantastic journey for Amazon in India so far. Today, it has more than 11 lakh sellers with more than half coming from Tier-2 cities and below. The company aims to digitise one crore businesses by 2025. Today, it is delivering to all serviceable pin codes in India.

Latest Developments
On 24 February, Amazon India announced that it will integrate its logistics network (from pickup to delivery) and ‘SmartCommerce’ services with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a private non-profit company established by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade of Government of India. ‘SmartCommerce’ is an AWS-powered suite of SaaS products that enables MSMEs in India to build and scale their businesses across digital mediums and will have enablers for onboarding to the ONDC network. This will be Amazon’s initial collaboration with ONDC as it continues to explore other potential opportunities for stronger integration between the two in future.

Speaking on the occasion, Manish Tiwary, Country Manager, India Consumer Business, Amazon India, said, “Amazon’s vision and commitment for India is closely aligned with ONDC’s objectives of digitally enabling small businesses, and providing convenience and choice to customers across the country. We are excited about the opportunities to mobilise Amazon’s industry-leading infrastructure and technology, including logistics, and small business digitisation tools, to help the ONDC accelerate its objectives. We remain committed to be being a catalyst for India’s digitisation efforts throughout the economy.”

Amazon has consistently leveraged technology and innovation on behalf of Indian customers and sellers, and digitised over 4 million small businesses and kirana stores in India, providing access to cutting edge technology towards online selling.