Amazon makes ‘express’ push to woo vendors amid India regulations worry

Jeff Bezos (R) and Amazon India’s Amit Agarwal ride a truck. Photo credit: Amazon.

Vendors are the lifeblood of ecommerce marketplaces in India. In the sea of sameness in products, it is the quality and number of vendors that eventually differentiates Flipkart, Amazon, and Snapdeal from one another.

It is also the point of some serious contention in the country, with a recent government rule making at least two of the top three ecommerce companies potentially illegal operators – depending on who you ask.

See: Amazon and Flipkart may be in trouble after India’s policy change. Snapdeal is happy

Because government regulations have made it that they can’t hold inventory, ecommerce companies in the country have learned to woo small businesses to get on their platform – from opening up “universities” to teach them the process, to helping them get loans, to even teaching them how to create their own catalogs.

Photo credit: Amazon.

Taking this a step further, Amazon today launched an express service to help thousands of small and medium businesses in India, starting off with the country’s financial capital Mumbai.

The company has been leaning a lot on India to fuel overall company sales, especially since it missed the boat in China. Since getting more sellers onboard has a direct impact on sales – more sellers mean more variety in merchandise – this could add more pressure on rivals.

Called Amazon Tatkal (the Hindi word for instant), the service aims to engage thousands of entrepreneurs, artisans, manufacturers, and sellers to help them sell online on the spot. The promise is to get them on board in 60 minutes.

“Our conversations with hundreds of SMBs reveal that there is a high level of interest among them to get online and start selling, but they are unable to overcome perception barriers of the process being time consuming, tedious and complex,” Amazon India’s director of Seller Services, Gopal Pillai, said in a statement.

Designed as a van, Amazon Tatkal will include registration, imaging and cataloging services, and basic seller training mechanisms, the company said.

Specially trained company representatives will educate sellers on the benefits of selling online, introduce them to the specialized seller services offered by the company, and launch interested sellers on the Amazon platform.

“Many interested sellers tend to put off onboarding tasks (on perceptions of it being a laborious process). As always, we worked backwards from seller needs and conceptualized Amazon Tatkal. We believe this initiative will help sellers to overcome these constraints, get them onboard, and start selling on the Amazon platform with speed and ease,” Gopal said.