Amazon plans to offer logistics network to sellers not using its platform

With multi channel fulfillment, sellers can leverage Amazon’s fulfilment capabilities to pick, pack and ship products to the customer from the sellers’ inventory in Amazon fulfilment centers

At a time when the e-commerce industry is not growing as fast as before in the country, Amazon India is planning to open up its logistics network for use even by merchants, who do not sell on its platform.

"By our internal metrics, we know that if Amazon promises to deliver on a certain day, it happens 99.8 percent of the time. Basically what we are staying now is that even if you as a merchant don't sell on Amazon, you can still use our warehousing network and transportation", said Amazon India head Manish Tiwary.

Through this move, the company is primarily aiming to onboard D2C brands across India. The brands will now be able to leverage Amazon's logistics and supply chain capabilities to serve customer orders from various sales channels, including their own websites.

"Multi-channel fulfilment democratises customer order fulfilment and enables sellers to expand their reach by leveraging Amazon delivery network serving 100 percent of India’s serviceable pin-codes. With MCF, sellers can leverage Amazon’s fulfilment capabilities to pick, pack and ship products to the customer from the sellers’ inventory in Amazon fulfilment centers," the company said.

"This initiative simplifies order management, tracking, tax invoicing and shipping, irrespective of the channel where the order comes from. It allows entrepreneurs to focus on core business activities such as product development, marketing, and customer service while Amazon handles order fulfilment," it added.

Festive season sales

This move has also come just a month before the festive season sales start in India in October. By some estimates, the October-December period accounts for almost half of all e-commerce sales in a given year.

"We are seeing a trend of premiumisation across the industry even as we talk about rising inflation. My sense is that 2023 might be the best festive sales year of the last few years. We are very excited for Diwali," said Tiwary.

Amazon is on course to meet its target of digitising 10 million of them by 2025, he said at the fourth edition of the Amazon Smbhav summit on August 31.

Smbhav, which is a corruption of the word Sambhav in Hindi, is Amazon's event that is focused on enlightening Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) about the opportunities that technology makes possible.

By this time last year, Amazon had digitised 4 million (40 lakh) small businesses and the base has now increased to around 6.2 million (62 lakh), Tiwary said.