The popular gifts like leather shoes and luxury bedding on Amazon for the Americans is being sourced from Indian merchants this holiday season which offer the best deals.
For the e-commerce giant’s American site, the company has been aggressively recruiting Indian vendors to list their products with the platform as the company looks out to lower its prices. Ever since the Indiana outreach began two years ago, over 27,000 Indian vendors have enrolled with the company. Ranging from smaller firms like The Boho Street, a seller of vegan tapestries, incense and handcrafted copper mugs to the Tata Group, among the largest of Indiana conglomerates offering its Titan range of watches, have enrolled at amazon.
In India, amazon.in – Amazon’s Indian branch, is the second largest.
Amazon has been able to lower prices for consumers because exporting goods through the e-commerce route eliminates some of the typical costs to a traditional importer. This strategy has however also benefited Amazon from the hefty fees that it charges its sellers and has been able to create a very large product range.
An instant and turnkey access to the American market has been provided by Amazon to The Boho Street and its founder Abhishek Middha and many others.
“Amazon handles everything in the U.S., from shipping to customer handling, so we can focus on making the best quality products and adding more products to our catalog,” he said.
“Amazon taught us how to create a brand,” he said.
The sophistication of the strategy of the Seattle retailer is shown by its growth of Indian global seller program. Even as the company operates the second largest e-commerce site in India, it also views India to be a source of low cost labor and high quality products suitable to be sold on its American site – particularly in key categories like apparel, where it faces stiff competition from the likes of Walmart.
Many products such as cotton towels, made in India, are already being bought by Americans, said Abhijit Kamra, who heads Amazon’s global selling program in India.
“What we are trying to do is compress the global supply chain and bring sellers and customers closer,” he said. Customers of Indian heritage are attracted by some of the Indian products that find place on the main Amazon.com site like sarees. Mt Karma said that among the others in the 75 million Indian products on the main site such as jewelry and health products, also attract other customers.
Customers in the United States have been aided in locating Indian products by the creation of a special page – Amazon.com/India, where many of the Indian products are listed. Shopper interest for the holiday selling season, which started off with Black Friday, was generated by the company months ahead by programming special “lightning deals” and helping the sellers to stock the goods in the United States. Even money was lent by the company on some occasions.
Amazon’s bottom line is impacted by its India program. Generally, about a third of the final sale price for a product is given away to Amazon by a typical seller who agrees to fulfillment of a range of Amazon services such as purchasing advertising and allowing Amazon to store and deliver the products to the customers from Amazon’s American warehouses.
(Source:www.nytimes.com)
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