To target small vendors.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: Amazon’s ‘Easy Ship’ delivery model, successfully tested in India, is going offshore to help small vendors deliver products to the buyers’ location with minimal effort.
Amazon entered India in 2013 with hope of getting on top of the country’s e-retail industry, but the road wasn’t easy for the US retail giant as India doesn’t allow foreign investment in the e-commerce firms that deliver products directly from its warehouse.
After this setback, market watchers around the world concluded that all doors are closed for Amazon India and they might have to wrap up the business here. Amazon made a comeback despite the hiccups by envisaging a new delivery model called ‘Easy Ship’, an exclusive model formulated for small vendors in India.
The Easy Ship model of Amazon ensures that vendors don’t have to stock the products in the Amazon warehouse but instead they will be contacted directly by Amazon delivery boys and the products will be picked up from their doorsteps as and when customers place orders. After implementing the Easy Ship model, Amazon saw a spike in its vendors, putting it in the second tier only next to Flipkart when it comes to total number of vendors.
According to Amit Agarwal, the regional head of Amazon, India was a great learning for the company and Easy Ship has proved to be a successful model incubated in India and the same learning will now reach other countries like China, the US and the UK with minor changes that apply to the smaller sellers in these foreign countries.
The same model is followed in India by Flipkart and Snapdeal.
Currently, 60% of Amazon’s total shipment is fulfilled using Easy Ship, thus getting easy access to 13,000 vendors out of 20,000 total vendors registered on Amazon India.
Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, in an interview with The Economic Times, praised the efforts of Amazon India: “One of the things that I really admire about our team here in India is how many inventions they are doing. I am excited about our ability to export some of that invention to the rest of the world.”