Ahead of the annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) sale, Amazon has slashed the subscription fee for new exporters joining its Global Selling program for the first three months from $120 to $1.
This is applicable to exporters joining the Global Selling program between Nov 7 2022 and May 6 2023. Further, Amazon has also launched SEND - a logistics solution to simplify international shipping for Indian exporters.
New logistics solution
SEND will allow exporters end-to-end access to a hassle-free logistics solution at competitive rates. The solution is currently available for exporters on Amazon Global Selling to ship air parcels from India to Amazon’s fulfilment centers in the US, with additional destinations and shipping modes to be launched soon.
Bhupen Wakankar, Director, Global Trade, Amazon India said, “The BFCM sale marks the beginning of the global holiday season. Coming right after the festive season in India, it has traditionally been a key growth period for our sellers. With more and more people relying on ecommerce for products globally, we believe that the 2022 BFCM sale period will help accelerate the exports business for our sellers. We will continue to take steps to expand the ecommerce exports opportunity to lakhs of entrepreneurs across the country as we work towards our goal of enabling $20 billion in cumulative exports from India by 2025.”
Sale events
Indian exporters are expected to launch thousands of new products on Amazon’s global websites for the BFCM sale that starts on Thursday, Nov 24 and ends on Monday, Nov 28. These events like the BFCM sale, the Prime Day etc have traditionally been periods of high growth for Indian exporters.
Speaking to BusinessLine about the regulatory environment around exports in India, Wakankar said, “It is not as much as regulations, but government recognising that ecommerce is slightly different aspect of exports and the need to focus on it specifically. In the upcoming foreign trade policy if ecommerce gets a special attention, that will drive a lot of focus on the painpoints that sellers continue to see.”
Further, sharing an example of these challenges, he said, in case of B2B exporters, they have a large volumetric shipment. Whereas, an e-commerce seller has many small shipments and so transaction volumes are high - this increases the number of times sellers interact with custom officials, or the amount of paperwork the ecommerce exporters will need to do.
“These are specific needs of ecommerce industry, and if government creates a specific chapter in the upcoming policy, it will help in reducing friction, which is building on the digitisation platform already in place,” he added.