Amazon India sellers hit $1bn global sales

Bengaluru: Indian sellers on Amazon’s global platforms, largely the US, sold goods worth over $1 billion in the last three and half years, the e-commerce major has said. It now has over 50,000 sellers selling to Amazon’s global audience and aims to hit a gross sales mark of $5 billion in the next four years. 

The local arm of the Seattle-based e-commerce major said its global selling programme has enabled small and medium enterprises to reach a worldwide audience of 300 million users. Indian merchants have a wide selection of 140 million products available to global markets. At the end of 2018, Amazon had 32,000 Indian sellers in this programme.

For Amazon, over 80% of these exporters are coming from non-metro, tier-2 and below cities, said Gopal Pillai, head of seller services, Amazon India. The top selling products overseas are in the categories like home, books, apparel and kitchen. The leading markets for the local merchants across the US and Europe are New York, Los Angeles, London and Berlin among others. 

When asked about the impact of impending entry of Reliance in Indian e-commerce, Amazon’s India head Amit Agarwal said he does not worry about what the competitors are doing, and that he is hoping consumers will continue to shop with Amazon even if new players are entering the space. “We are working closely with the government to enable small and medium enterprises to take ‘Made in India’ global,” he said. He added the company is in complete compliance with local laws after the recent changes in FDI for e-commerce. Last week, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts the India operations had minimal impact due to the FDI laws, that were implemented from February. 

While Amazon is giving serious importance to its global selling programme, its Global Store in India, where Indians could directly purchase from the US platform in Indian currency, has been put on the back burner. TOI reported last month how Amazon’s Global Store, launched in 2016, had become non-existent on the Indian platform to comply with FDI regulations. “We don’t have anything to share on that,” Agarwal said on the fate of Global Store in India. According to Amazon, it has seen a significant spike in engagement from local sellers during major global sale events. During Prime Day, it saw an increase of 69% in number of sellers, while both Cyber Monday and Black Friday saw an increase of 30% in seller numbers.