Amazon empowers 1 lakh+ local shops, kiranas and other neighbourhood stores to celebrate this festive season

This festive season, over 100,000 Amazon-enabled local shops, kiranas and neighbourhood stores from across India are geared up to serve customers and celebrate with them, the Company announced. More than 20,000 offline retailers, kiranas and local shops from “Local Shops on Amazon” program will be participating in their first “Great Indian Festival” and will be catering to customers in their cities and across India, selling everything from daily essentials to large appliances and from home décor items to gifts and fresh flowers. The program is seeing remarkable response from retailers from across India and has scaled rapidly in just 5 months; with more than 40% of the sellers coming from outside the top 10 cities. The success of the “Local Shops on Amazon” program underlines Amazon India’s commitment to work closely with the vast network of neighbourhood stores across India, integrating ecommerce into their operations through focused initiatives such as Amazon Easy, I Have Space, and Amazon Pay Smart Stores.

Manish Tiwary, VP – Amazon India, said, “This festive season we are focused on helping our sellers and other MSME partners grow their business and bounce back from the recent challenges. In the last few months we have seen businesses of all sizes increasingly adopt technology into their business. The integration of Amazon’s programs with 100,000+ ubiquitous neighbourhood stores – for selling online, to help customers buy online, to make deliveries and enable contactless payments – is a testament of the adaptability and inventiveness of Indian entrepreneurs. We hope that this Great Indian Festival will bring them growth and success as they get ready to serve millions of customers across India”.

Local Shops on Amazon is a new program that was launched in April this year to help bring offline retailers, kiranas and local shops online. The program has scaled rapidly within five months of launch and now has more than 20,000 retailers in 400 cities. Today, thousands of offline retailers from Meerut to Ludhiana, Saharanpur to Surat, Indore to Ernakulum and Kanchipuram are part of the Local Shops on Amazon program. Local Shops on Amazon offer a wide range of products including Fresh flowers, Home and Kitchen products, Furniture, Electronics, Books and Toys amongst others. This festive season Amazon.in customers will be able to shop from some of their favourite local stores in their cities, get deliveries the same/next day and also benefit from value added services offered by these stores.

Amazon Easy enables assisted shopping experience for new to e-commerce customers. They can place an order on Amazon.in with guided assistance from the store staff and pick up the order from the store or get it delivered at their doorstep. An upgraded ‘Amazon Easy’ store format has recently been launched offering a touch & feel product experience and integrating multiple Amazon services through a single touchpoint. The first such store is now operational in Bengaluru. The upgraded format stores will soon be expanded to other parts of the country.

Amazon Pay Smart Store is currently enabling 15,000+ neighbourhood shops to provide a contactless shopping experience to their customers. With Amazon Pay Smart Store, customers can simply scan the store’s QR code using the Amazon app to explore the products available in the store. After selecting the products, they wish to buy they can check out with Amazon Pay, which gives them a choice of using UPI, balance, or credit or debit cards. Customers can on-the-spot convert a transaction into an EMI, and avail exciting rewards from their banks or through Amazon Pay.