Inc42 Daily Brief
Stay Ahead With Daily News & Analysis on India’s Tech & Startup Economy
In line with its vision to make big in India, Amazon has launched a unique initiative to help small & medium businesses (SMBs) to sell on its platform through Amazon Tatkal.
Amazon Tatkal is defined as one stop shop on-the-go that will enable thousands of SMBs to get online and sell on Amazon.in, in less than 60 minutes. Starting with New Delhi, the service will traverse the country, engaging with entrepreneurs, artisans, manufacturers, and sellers and help them sell online.
Gopal Pillai, Director & GM, Seller Services, Amazon India said, “Our conversations with hundreds of SMBs reveal that there is a high level of interest among them to get online and start selling, but they are unable to overcome perception barriers of the process being time consuming, tedious and complex. As a result, many interested sellers tend to put off onboarding tasks. As always, we worked backwards from seller needs and conceptualized Amazon Tatkal. We believe this initiative will help sellers to overcome these constraints, get them onboard, and start selling on the Amazon platform with speed and ease.”
Amazon Tatkal is a specially designed studio-on-wheels that will have specially trained company representatives to educate interested sellers across multiple cities in the country and engage with local businesses over the next few months. It will educate sellers on the benefits of selling online, introduce them to the specialised seller services offered by Amazon.in, including innovations like Easy Ship, Fulfilment by Amazon as well as Global Selling. The representatives will also help sellers from establishing business on its platform to helping them with registration, on-the-spot imaging & cataloguing services, and basic seller training mechanisms in real time and experience the benefits of launching an online business.
Gopal added, “We are very excited to see the high level of interest and enthusiasm from sellers to get online and benefit from the digital economy. A number of sellers on Amazon.in witnessed a growth of 250% (YOY) last year.”
Amazon has been extensively working to launch services that meet different business requirements of sellers and help them grow their business online. Over the past two and a half years, it has introduced programs like Seller University, an extensive education and skilling program for SMBs; Fulfilment By Amazon, a fulfilment service wherein Amazon.in packs, ships and delivers products to customers, manages returns and does customer service on behalf of the sellers; Easy Ship, an assisted shipping service for sellers across India; and Seller Flex, implementation of FBA technology at sellers’ warehouses.
It also launched its Global Selling Program for sellers in India in May last year, which today counts over 6000 sellers from India selling their ‘Make in India’ products on Amazon’s nine global marketplaces to over 294 Mn worldwide customers.
It also introduced a lending program for sellers through an independent, third-party partner to offer secured & unsecured loans to sellers from INR 5 lakh to INR 2 Cr at very competitive interest rates.
Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.