Amazon hopes India sales to set tone for global calendar
Seattle, Singapore, Europe offices to keep watch on festive sale
It’s almost 9.30 pm on Saturday. Manish Tiwary, vice-president of category management for Amazon India, has returned jet-lagged from a trip to the Seattle headquarters but all ears to a young team member who has walked up with a query.
In snug shoes, a pair of shorts and, of course, a T-shirt with Amazon’s ‘Great Indian Festival’ logo emblazoned , Tiwary, responsible for ensuring every customer gets to buy without a hitch, is set for the long night ahead.
But, even after successfully running festive sales in previous years, lastminute jitters are something even he is not able to avoid.
“There are things that can go wrong during the ‘spike’, at midnight when everyone would be logging in to buy. Pages might take longer to load, a payment gateway might not work smoothly— are a lot of things that can go wrong. So, we keep double-checking systems till the last moment,” he said.
World Trade Centre ( WTC) in Bengaluru, the headquarters of Amazon India, is buzzing with activity. An army of young 20-something coders, techies, donning ‘War Room Warrior’ T-shirts, stay glued to their laptop screens, ensuring all systems are good before the launch of the Great Indian Festival at midnight.
There are as many as 10 war rooms on different floors of the building, keeping a watchful eye on all verticals.
More than 50 ‘Amazonians’ are manning each conference room, with giant screens, giving second-by-second updates on sale, while whiteboards highlight the key numbers.
The stamp of Great Indian Festival is all over like an anthem. The leadership keeps flitting from one war room to another to ensure nothing is out of place. Global eyes on the festive sale
Why call a festive sale a war? “Because, war-like preparations go into it almost 12 months in advance to ensure that on D -day we give our best to customers,” said Tiwary.
For Amazon Global, this sale holds utmost importance as it sets the stage for the e-commerce giant’s international festive calendar.
Not only in India teams across the globe in Seattle, Singapore, Europe and some other countries are working in tandem to make a success of the Great Indian Festival.
“Every year, the mandate is to make the sale bigger and better,” said Kishore Thota, director of marketing and customer experience.
As India sales set the tone for the season, the action would shift to the US and Europe next for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year.
Teams from other regions are in constant touch with India and every few hours hold status-check meetings to know about the progress.
This year, Thota and his team are keeping a special eye on how Amazon Hindi fares during the sale.
The company over the past one year painstakingly worked to ensure artificial intelligence and machine learning work
smoothly. They have now managed to convert into Hindi interface for almost all of the products available. Language is one of the most important plays for Amazon India to ensure it reaches out to the next 100 million customers.
Slowdown? What slowdown?
Hours before the beginning of the sale, Tiwary’s mobile phone keeps ringing, with calls from chief executive officers of various companies eager to know about last-minute preparations and trying to gauge what they should do to push sales of their products.
While there is chatter around a slowdown, the number of new product launches, he claims, is at an all-time high. Also the festive sale, opened for Prime members at noon on Saturday, showed more than a positive response, he claims.
“I have been in constant touch with sellers. They have not shown any signs of nervousness. In fact, they have stocked up and are ready for a mega sale. I keep speaking to brands. They are seeing bumper demand for new product launches. We have launched Oneplus television, the price of which is close to a lakh, but its selling out. People want to spend if the selection, value proposition, and the trust attached to the platform and the product are right,” adds Tiwary.