365telugu.com online news,india,september 16th,2021:
1.How is the festive demand panning out this time around?
While the situation has improved in most parts of India, our fight against the pandemic continues. Our utmost priority remains to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our customers, seller partners, ecosystem partners and as well as our employees.Together with thousands of small & medium business and brand partners,we will continue to offer our customers the widest selection,convenience, and fast delivery. We are gearing up for the upcoming festive season as customers can look forward to celebrating from the comfort and safety of their homes. With a selection from top brands, great deals and offers customers can
look forward to a wide selection of products across categories like Fashion, Grocery, Home & Kitchen, and Smartphones, work from home and study from home essentials and more. They can explore options to shop from tens of thousands of small businesses including local stores, karigars, and Saheli entrepreneurs, while supporting their business in these challenging times.
Given the demand, we anticipate this season to be very strong. We feel confident given the way our sellers are preparing for it,the infrastructure and support we have created, this Diwali should be very good for our sellers and, of course, for our consumers.
We will continue to remain focused on ensuring the best selection & customer shopping online experience in the farthest parts of the country.
2.How different do you think the purchasing pattern would be this festive season?
The festive season has already begun for us, we recently concluded Onam and Rakhi shopping store on A.in and observed new trends on all three fronts – sellers, consumers, and categories. On the seller front, more and more local shops are coming online to sell. We have seen it over the last few months and believe
that it will peak during the Diwali festival. Secondly, a large number of sellers coming online are from smaller towns which are similar to the customer mix who shop on A.in.On the category front, with customers shopping online,the one which has picked up momentum from last Diwali is groceries. Additionally, some new categories which have grown rapidly over the last 12
months, are personal grooming, sports; a lot of categories are around hobbies. These categories have grown over the last 18 to 20 months and we expect this trend to peak during Diwali. Besides this, in the large businesses of fashion and beauty,electronics and daily essentials, we expect the trends to be largely in line with last Diwali.
3.What has been the growth from tier 2-3 markets?
Over the last 15 to 18 months, we have seen a lot of customers move online. Nearly 65% of customer orders and over 85% of new customers on Amazon.in are from tier 2 and below geographies. Customers across nearly 100% of India’s serviceable pin codes are shopping with us and over 85% of the traffic comes from mobile. We saw tremendous growth in categories from tier 2 and below geographies in the following categories:
o Grocery: First-time purchasers more than doubled on Amazon Pantry + Fresh post Covid with more than 60% share of new customers coming from tier 2/3 towns
o LA & F: We offer the largest selection of appliances & furniture. We saw a ~60% increase in unit sales for large appliances and ~90% growth in Office Furniture -chairs, desks, etc. Washing Machines have witnessed a 1.5X demand growth vs March 21 with more than half of the growth is coming from non-metros & Tier 2 towns.Consumption is getting stronger and stronger in these towns with more and more consumers getting comfortable shopping online. It is very important for us and whenever we talk about customers, we do not look at the transactional value of a customer. We look at the relationship value to get the customer shop online and what they would do online for years to come.
4.Are you prepared for the festive season?
This festive season is not a normal one for reasons we all know, and our success metric would be focused on how we can make our sellers successful. Together with thousands of small & medium business and brand partners, we will continue to offer our customers
the widest selection, convenience, and fast delivery.
What we are doing right now is we are rapidly putting the infrastructure together, both in terms of warehouse space – we have just opened a large number of new warehouses – and in terms of getting all our people who work on the field vaccinated. On the customer side, we have also got a lot of innovations including introducing a lot of new languages.We are all geared up for the festive season and will continue to provide customers with anything they need, anytime from anywhere in India.
5.What are your expectations from this year’s season?
We feel confident given the way our sellers are preparing for it, the infrastructure and support which we have created, this Diwali should be good for sellers and of course our consumers. Customers can look forward to shopping from a wide selection of products
across categories like Fashion & Beauty, Grocery, Smartphones, TVs, Laptops, Appliances and much more from the comfort and safety of their homes.
6.How are you ramping up the infrastructure requirement to cater the customer demand during festive season?
We recently expanded our storage capacity by more than 40% over 2020, across 15 states to support its 8.5 lakh sellers across the country. With the launch of 7th fulfilment centre in Gurugram, Haryana Amazon India has more than 60 fulfilment centres across
Maharashtra, Bihar, Gujarat, Assam, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh among others. In 2021, we have expanded out network to offer 43 million cubic feet of storage capacity, creating tens of thousands of direct & indirect work opportunities.The new specialized FC in Haryana is spread across a floor area of close to 1.5 million square feet and offering more than 2 million cubic feet of storage capacity to more than 45,000 sellers. It will house a wide selection of products from the large appliances and furniture
category.We are also expanding our last mile network ahead of the festive season to deliver smiles across the length and breadth of the country. With more than 1700 Amazon owned and partner delivery stations, 28,000 I Have Space store partners, a strong network of Delivery Service Partners across 350 cities and Flex partners across 65 cities, we are prepared to deliver a great shopping experience to our customers