Amazon India Gears Up For Festive Season, Launches 24 Seller Cafes

In order to aid the sellers on its platform, ecommerce giant Amazon India is reportedly opening ‘seller cafes’ across 24 cities and towns in India. The aim is to provide real-time on-ground assistance to the sellers associated with the platform.

Gopal Pillai, Director and GM, Seller Services, Amazon India said, “We are opening 24 ‘seller cafes’ in cities and towns to offer on-ground support to sellers to help them getting ready for the festive season. Sellers can use this service to set up a new account for imaging or cataloguing help, or any other issues that they face.”

According to an official statement, Amazon has added 20,000 new sellers in the past two months through its new initiatives. “This is a good sign for small and medium businesses, enabling more to join our seller platforms,” Pillai added.

The ecommerce platform has increased its delivery network as well. Inc42 reported earlier this month that Amazon India has increased its last mile delivery network. It now includes 12,500 local stores and retail outlets in 50 cities.

According to Pillai, the ‘seller cafe’ programme is one of the first steps to ensure that Amazon’s ready to handle the consumer demand this festive season. “For this, Amazon has repurposed some of its seller sales offices to set up the cafes. We have over 1,400 ecommerce-specialist freelancers across 16 cities that we have trained and certified to provide help to sellers,” he said.

In February 2016, Amazon India launched a unique initiative to help small & medium businesses (SMBs) to sell on its platform through Amazon Tatkal. Amazon Tatkal is defined as a one stop shop on-the-go that was aimed to enable thousands of SMBs to get online and sell on Amazon.in, in less than 60 minutes. Following that, it also launched a pilot programme for delivering orders via cycles.

In June 2016, Amazon announced that it would infuse $3 Bn in India in the next few years to take on its rivals. In July it launched its biggest Fulfillment Centre in Sonipat near New Delhi. Post the acquisition of Myntra and Jabong by Flipkart – the competition has grown fiercer between Snapdeal, Amazon, and Flipkart on all fronts.

This development was first reported by ET.