Over 63,000 sellers on Amazon from AP, Telangana: Kshitij Jain

HYDERABAD: Delegates from Amazon India visited Hyderabad on Friday to take part in the Retail 4.0 Forum conducted by the Federation of Telangana Chambers of Commerce Industry (FTCCI), here in the city.

In an interaction with media after the Retail 4.0 Forum, Director of  External Fulfillment at Amazon India, Mr Kshitij Jain appreciated the FTCCI's long association with the e-commerce giant and said that since 2022, they have trained sellers in Telangana.

“Our aim is to digitize the approach of more and more small, and medium enterprises (SMEs) and get them successful in selling online. And as a part of that, we have so far had 500 sellers who have completed the training programme, among which 250 have already launched their products on Amazon,” said Mr. Kshitij Jain, in an interaction with Deccan Chronicle.

While the company does not provide extra hand-holding to the sellers in their other markets, they provide support in logistics to the sellers in India.

“When we launched in India, we realised it was hard for the sellers to support their own logistics, and to answer that we built an offering called ‘Easy Ship’ and now it has become the the main offering for any seller who joins Amazon,” he said adding that the company has expanded the services to 9 countries after the successful run in India.

Talking about ‘Local Shops on Amazon’, another programme launched in the initial days of the pandemic, he said that the efforts of the company to help small neighbourhood stores to come online and sustain their business during the unprecedented Covid times, have shown exceptional results as tens of thousands of local stores from across India have discovered the value of going digital with this program.

The ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ programme offers offline retailers and neighbourhood stores the benefits of e-commerce and helps them supplement existing footfalls at their physical stores with a digital presence on Amazon.in.

On the importance of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana for Amazon.in, Mr. Jain said that the Local Shops program has seen great momentum in the Telugu states with over 16,000 Local Shops sellers from the state while home, electricals, fixtures & fittings and foods are the most in demand products from here.

Meanwhile, overall sellers on Amazon.in from AP and Telagana are over 63,000 while the number of sellers in Hyderabad is one third of the overall sellers from both the states with 21,000 sellers.

While Nizamabad, Karimnagar, Mahabubnagar and Nalgonda are the other significant seller markets for Amazon in Telangana, Visakhapatnam, Guntur, East Godavari, Kurnool and Nellore are the significant markets in Andhra Pradesh.

“Our focus is on technology and enablement to help sellers wherever they are, in their journey of online-offline convergence,” said Mr Kshitij.

On being asked about why one should choose Amazon.in while there are also other players providing similar services, he reiterated “because we at Amazon promise a certain level of customer’s trust.”