Amazon to onboard more mobile only vendors before festive sales; Seller app enhancement underway

Along with its plan to boost its logistics network, the Jeff Bezos lead company Amazon Indiais also aiming to boost its seller base. In 2016, the etailer saw 160% growth in its seller base. This time the online marketplace is looking to push its seller quantity to increase festive sales.

Mobile registration for online sellers

Before the festive season is in full swing, Amazon decided to launch an application to allow online sellers to register via mobile to sell on their platform. Amazon India is the first to initiate this facility among all the Amazon franchises in the world.

• Over 70% of Indian online sellers process orders and update inventory via mobile (That’s higher than US and European online sellers).

The ecommerce company will be enhancing the long tail needs to multiply its product offerings before Dussehra and Diwali sales set in, which are the biggest sales periods of the year accounting for 1/3rd of annual sales for Amazon.

“The first six months and the first 10-50 sales are crucial for the sellers to gain confidence about the effectiveness of the marketplace. The long tail needs to believe in the model and hence we extend the same support to all sellers irrespective of their scale. Even our rewards are geared towards the sellers inputs to the markeplace rather than the sales they generate on our platform,” Gopal Pillai states, the general manager for Amazon India seller services.

• 70% of sellers belong to tier II and III cities, claims

Amazon has round two lakh sellers registered. From these only 1,600 generate crores of rupees annually. The rest are much smaller.

The response to push notifications on the Amazon seller app is much faster and frequent compared to email updates. The etailer’s application is also used regularly by sellers to respond to customer queries, which is much faster than desktop.

To ensure its seller engagement initiatives are successful in tier II and II cities Amazon India has introduced seller helplines in local languages like Telugu, Tamil and Kannada this year, as more than half the calls from online sellers happen in these languages.