Amazon Business, the B2B e-commerce vertical of the company, along with e-pharmacy business Amazon Pharmacy and acquired social commerce platform Glowroad, are emerging as strong opportunities in India, Manish Tiwary, country manager of Amazon’s India Consumer Business told businessline.
“The business which I am most excited about right now, is Amazon business. I see a lot of promise there. We will also build up Amazon pharmacy very actively next year. The supply chain situation overall is getting better and some macroeconomic factors are also getting a little better now. Even if they are not, a good resilient Indian seller has now managed to adjust with that. As a result, we expect to continue seeing acceleration in customer number, prime members and sellers next year,” he added.
Road ahead
The company acquired Glowroad earlier this year, which has a network of resellers acting as conduits between the ecommerce platform and consumers. The model is largely focused on new-to-internet users who need a trusted intermediary to start shopping online.
“We feel that the social commerce space, (the reseller space) is very attractive. The number of resellers on Glowroad has grown 6x since the acquisition. We are very excited about where it will take us in 2023,” said Tiwary.
In 2022, Amazon said 65 per cent of its customer orders and 85 per cent of new customers came from tier-2 and -3 cities. Over the past year, e-commerce companies like Flipkart and Meesho have reduced focus on reseller model as they found users being more comfortable in shopping directly from the platform. To this, Tiwary said, “Just because someone’s changing it does not mean it does not work. I’m sure there is space to innovate and make the model better. But we love the Glowroad product, the way it is designed and the team behind it.”
Further, Amazon Pharmacy today has customers across 23,000 PIN-codes in India. In top 10 cities like Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and others, customer can get medicines delivered the same day. Tiwary added that Amazon has partnered with Apollo Pharmacy in this category.
Amazon Business is currently offering over 16 crore GST enabled products from 6.5 lakh sellers and has seen its total sales grow 2x with 42 per cent increase in monthly transacting customers in 2022. “The B2B sellers aren’t just selling to small businesses but even to large enterprises like BYJU’S, M&M and Titan etc. Over 30 per cent of our customers come from tier-2, -3 cities/towns and we serve 99.5 per cent of PIN codes across the country,” he added.
Meeting parameters
Amazon has announced shutting down of three business this year — Amazon Academy, Amazon Distribution and Amazon Foods. Tiwary said the move did not have any correlation to the market environment or chasing profitability. The decisions were taken as part of the annual reviews where the company found these business not standing up to one or the other internal benchmarks for new pilots.
He added that every new vertical has to meet the three broad parameters — is there a big enough market opportunity; can Amazon bring some differentiation in the space; and would the business be able to run in a sustainable fashion in the long run. “We just finished our annual review with worldwide and we continue to be super excited about India. We are very excited about our e-commerce business, and what we’ve managed to achieve in terms of customer traction, prime member traction and seller traction. We will continue to invest with the same sort of speed and aggressiveness, which we have seen earlier,” he said.
