Amazon India Boosts Its FMCG Business With Amazon Pantry

Amazon India has launched Amazon Pantry, a service that will offer grocery and household essentials. It will also deliver the orders in a day.

Amazon Pantry will be accessible to all customers in India, whereas globally, it is only available to Amazon Prime customers.

Competing with retail chains such as Big Bazaar and Spencer’s, Amazon Pantry is replicating an online supermarket model that delivers up to 15 kg of products. The products will include large packs of atta, rice, pulses, edible oils and other staples. Home deliveries and shipping orders in a day will cost INR 20.

Currently, Amazon Pantry is operating in Hyderabad, but it soon plans to expand its reach nationwide.

Saurabh Srivastava, Amazon India director (category management – consumables) told ET that FMCG is now the largest category in Amazon India. The launch of Amazon Pantry has come at a time when the FMCG business at Amazon India has emerged amongst the top five categories by sales.

For Amazon India, the FMCG business grew by 215%  in terms of units sold, between January-June 2016. Grocery sales grew by 412% year-on-year, health and personal care 311%, and the beauty category by 265%. Currently, there are close to  9,000 sellers who work with Amazon India.

Amazon has also come up with two other formats for India — ‘Super Value Day’ and  ‘Subscribe and Save.’ Super Value Day allows customers to get back cash on their FMCG purchases on the first and second day of the month. Whereas Subscribe and Save enables buyers to subscribe to a product for regular purchase and get additional discount.

Few days back, Amazon launched Amazon Prime membership program in India. With Prime, customers in over 100 cities can avail unlimited free one-day and two-day delivery on eligible products. Earlier this month, Amazon India inaugurated its largest Fulfilment Centre (FC) in Sonipat near New Delhi. The centre is spread over 200,000 square feet with more than 800,000 cubic feet of storage space. Prior to this in February, it also launched a unique initiative to help small & medium businesses (SMBs) to sell on its platform through Amazon Tatkal.