India is seen as vital to the fortunes of Amazon
AMERICANS shopping on Amazon.com this holiday season may find that the best deals for popular gifts like leather shoes and luxury bedding are coming from an unexpected source: Indian merchants.
Amazon, always on the lookout for ways to lower prices, has been recruiting Indian vendors to sell their goods directly on the e-commerce giant’s American site. At least 27,000 Indian sellers have signed up since Amazon began the outreach two years ago. They range from giants like Reliance Industries, a conglom- erate that hawks its Titan watch line on the site, to smaller firms like The Boho Street, a peddler of vegan tapestries, incense and handcrafted copper mugs.
The result is lower prices for consumers because selling foreign goods through the e-commerce giant cuts out costs of a traditional importer. But it also benefits Amazon, which gets to add to its product lineup and charge sellers hefty fees.
For merchants like Abhishek Middha, founder of The Boho Street, Amazon provides access to the American market.
“Amazon handles everything in the US, from shipping to cus- tomer handling, so we can focus on making the best quality products and adding more products to our catalogue,” he said.
Although Middha used to sell on other marketplaces like Etsy, he switched almost entirely to Amazon two years ago because of its vast scale.
Last year, his sales on Cyber Monday spiked to four times the usual level, propelling his annual revenue to $1.9 million. On Black Friday this year, his sales tripled compared with the previous day. “Amazon taught us how to create a brand,” Middha said.
The growth of Amazon’s Indian global seller programme shows how sophisticated the Seattle retailer’s strategy has become. The company operates India’s second-largest e-commerce site, Amazon.in. But Amazon also sees India as a source of cheap and high-quality products that can be sold on its US site, especially in categories like apparel.
Abhijit Kamra, who heads Amazon’s global selling programme in India, said Americans buy many products that are made in India, such as cotton towels. Of the 17 million Indian products on Amazon, things such as saris, tend to attract customers of Indian heritage. But other categories, like jewelry and health products, have wider appeal, he said.
“What we are trying to do is compress the global supply chain and bring sellers and customers closer,” he said by phone.