Amazon to digitise local stores and create more jobs

As part of its pledge to digitise one crore Indian small businesses by 2025, Amazon launched a new initiative called Smart Commerce to digitise store operations of its partner stores.

Smart Commerce is going to release its first set of solutions in the coming weeks to help local stores digitise billing and inventory management and enhance in-store experiences. The launch of other tools will be followed by the launch of other tools to help stores create their own online storefront and voice and chat-based shopping solutions.

Stores of any size can take advantage of Amazon's best services to provide a trustworthy experience to their customers, no matter where they are, through their own online storefront or Amazon.in. He said that we remain committed to digitise one crore small businesses in the country by 2025 and are super excited by the possibilities unlocked by smart commerce to accelerate progress.

At its inaugural Smbhav Summit in January 2020, Amazon pledged to digitise 10 million MSMEs, create 2 million jobs in India by the year 2025 and generate $10 billion in cumulative exports from India. The company doubled its exports pledge from $10 billion to $20 billion in the same time frame.

Over 4 million small businesses and local stores have already been digitised, up from 25 lakh last year, and has created over 1.16 million direct and indirect jobs in India, including 135,000 new jobs added in the last year alone.

More than 50 per cent of the 1.1 million sellers on Amazon.in, 85 per cent of new customers and 65 per cent of all customer orders are coming from tier 2 and below, according to Manish Tiwary, Country Manager, India Consumer Business at Amazon. More than 8 million local stores and small businesses use Amazon Pay for transactions.

We crossed a milestone of 10 lakh sellers on Amazon in the year 2021. More than 2,70, 000 local neighbourhood stores are partnering with Amazon to grow their businesses by selling online, partnering for last-mile delivery and as assisted shopping points, Tiwary said.

He said more than one lakh Indian exporters are part of the Global Selling program, which is on track to surpass $5 billion in e-commerce exports, but they don't have a timeline.

Dave Clark, CEO Worldwide Consumer at Amazon, said the company has invested more than $18 billion in selling partners' success since 2020, and has since been involved with Agarwal.

More than 24,000 employees are dedicated to supporting sellers across the company. Since the outbreak, we have doubled our fulfilment network capacity, opened dozens of new delivery stations and fulfilment centres and hired more than 500,000 new employees across our fulfilment and transportation networks, as well as doubled our fulfilment network capacity, according to Clark.