As part of its pledge to digitise one crore Indian small businesses by 2025, US retail giant Amazon has launched a new initiative named Smart Commerce to digitise store operations of its partner stores.
The program will help local stores digitise their offline operations, enhance in-store experience for walk-in customers and create their own online storefront to serve customers directly, Amit Agarwal, SVP, India and Emerging Markets, Amazon announced at its flagship annual summit Amazon Smbhav.
Smart Commerce will release its first set of solutions in the coming weeks to help local stores digitise billing and inventory management, and to enhance in-store experiences. This will be followed by the launch of other tools to help stores create their own online storefront and voice and chat-based shopping solutions.
“Stores of any size can now take advantage of the best of Amazon to provide a trustworthy experience to their customers no matter where they are, in their physical store, directly through their own online storefront or on Amazon.in. And we remain committed to our pledge to digitise one crore small businesses in the country by 2025 and are super excited by the possibilities unlocked by smart commerce to accelerate progress,” he said.
At its inaugural Smbhav Summit in January 2020, Amazon had pledged to digitise 10 million MSMEs, generate $10 billion in cumulative exports from India and create 2 million jobs in India by 2025. The company recently doubled its exports pledge from $10 billion to $20 billion in the same time frame.
Amazon claimed that it has already digitised over 4 million small businesses and local stores, up from 25 lakh from last year and have created over 1.16 million direct and indirect jobs in India including 135,000 new jobs added in the last one year alone.
Manish Tiwary, Country Manager, India Consumer Business at Amazon, who opened the event said more than 50 per cent of the 1.1 million sellers on Amazon.in, 85 per cent of new customers, and 65 per cent of all customer orders are coming from tier 2 and below geographies. More than 8 million local stores and small businesses use Amazon Pay for transactions.
“In 2021, we crossed a significant milestone of 10 lakh sellers on Amazon.in. More than 2,70,000 local neighbourhood stores are now partnering with Amazon, growing their businesses by selling online, partnering for last-mile delivery and as assisted shopping points,” Tiwary said.
He said over one lakh Indian exporters are part of its Global Selling program, who are on track to surpass $5 billion in e-commerce exports, without offering a timeline.
In an interaction with Agarwal, Dave Clark, CEO – Worldwide Consumer at Amazon, said the company has invested more than $18 billion globally in selling partners’ success since 2020.
“With more than 24,000 employees dedicated to supporting sellers across the company. To better support our sellers, we’ve doubled our fulfilment network capacity since the start of the pandemic, opening dozens of new delivery stations and fulfilment centres around the world and hiring more than 500,000 new employees across our fulfilment and transportation networks,” Clark said.
Source by www.businesstoday.in
