Amazon Launches ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ Programme to List Local Shops as Sellers

[asma zahid]

Amazon has launched a programme called ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ in India to scale its business and begin selling goods directly from local shops. The new initiative, which is probably going aimed toward giving a troublesome fight to Reliance Retail’s JioMart and can make things difficult for Walmart-owned Flipkart, has already been piloted within the country over the last six months with over 5,000 offline retailers and shopkeepers. The US e-commerce giant has also invited new local shopkeepers to become a neighborhood of its latest programme during which the corporate has promised to take a position Rs. 10 crores.

With a view to supply customers the convenience of ordering products online and provides scalability to offline retailers, Amazon has brought the new programme. It already has partnered with retailers from top metros also as tier-1 and tier-2 cities like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Delhi, Faridabad, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Lucknow, Mumbai, Pune, Saharanpur, and Surat among others. The initiative isn’t limited to local grocery shops or electronic stores. In fact, the pilot that the corporate began in over 100 cities across the country including sellers from categories like automotive, books, furniture, home decor, jewellery, kitchen appliances, sports, and toys.

Offline retailers who are becoming on board through the programme have one prime condition that’s to possess a delivery mechanism handy to deliver orders to customers either on an equivalent day or on subsequent day (with pin-code level granularity). this is often something that might ultimately help Amazon reduce the burden of enhancing its delivery fleet.

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Additionally, local shopkeepers under the programme will get the power to use the newly launched ‘Amazon Delivery app’ which will help them provide delivery updates to customers and Amazon and track their shipments on a day to day .

The timing of the Local Shops on Amazon programme is certainly interesting because the company — a bit like its arch-rival Flipkart — is struggling to fulfil an outsized number of orders thanks to the lockdown imposed by the govt to scale back the spread of COVID-19 within the country. The arrival of local shops would help resolve such issues within the future.

“We shall take the learnings from months of running this pilot and weeks of its effectiveness during COVID-19 to scale this India-first initiative to incorporate shopkeepers and retailers across India,” wrote Gopal Pillai, VP Seller Services, Amazon India, during a blog post.

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Sellers can join the programme by visiting a fanatical page on the Amazon India site. The page says that there won’t be any additional charges to hitch the initiative and therefore the standard fee of selling on the web marketplace are going to be applicable to Amazon Local Shops Sellers also . Moreover, it says that the participants will get access to the ‘Prime Badge’ which will help enhance discovery on the location .

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Alongside new sellers, shopkeepers who are already working with Amazon under the ‘I Have Space’ programme to act as delivery and pickup points and ‘Amazon Easy’ can join the new move and begin selling online.