Amazon’s Global Selling Programme for India, launched in May 2015 with 200 on board, is now 32,000 strong. The vendors have seen a growth of 200 per cent sales in 2017. In an interview with BusinessLine, Eric L Broussard, Vice-President and Head of International Seller Services at Amazon.com, said international e-commerce creates an enormous opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs to sell high quality products directly to millions of Amazon’s customers in nearly 180 countries, including the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan and Australia. Excerpts.
What is the addressable opportunity for Indian sellers who are part of Amazon’s Global Selling Programme?
We have a large number of sellers on Amazon and in 2017, half of the items that were purchased by our customers were sold by small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). The marketplace on Amazon has become a very big opportunity for Indian sellers because of its size and the propensity of customers to buy from these sellers. Cross-border sales by SMBs on Amazon grew 50 per cent YoY in 2017 and exports worldwide increased by nearly 30 per cent. Sales from SMBs selling cross-border represents more than 25 per cent of Amazon seller sales. Most important, cross-border sellers are growing twice as fast as sellers who just sell in their country of origin. From today, we are opening up Australia, expanding the opportunity for our Indian sellers to sell to Australian customers.
Is India among Amazon’s top three international marketplaces, how
many sellers do you have in the US ?
We don’t disclose ranking or numbers but I can tell you that over 300,000 SMBs in the US started selling on Amazon. More than 140,000 SMBs selling on Amazon worldwide surpassed $100,000 in annual sales last year. Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), shipped billions of items worldwide and during the holiday season, customers ordered over 1 billion items from SMBs on Amazon, with more than 140 million items ordered between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Indian sellers on the global selling programme also saw strong sales in the same period.
Historically, its by providing opportunities to small entrepreneurs that we have grown our marketplace business to this level.
What kind of infrastructure do you provide for Indian sellers who sell globally?
We have over 150 Fulfilment Centres (FCs) that the Indian sellers can ship their inventory to. We have made it dramatically simpler for an Indian seller to sell in New York or Japan, as sellers are in full control. They can decide which countries to list in, which products to ship into our FCs and don’t need to make big investments to set up an FC in Japan or learn how to do customer service in Spanish.
We do all of that for them. I’m very excited by India’s potential because a lot of manufacturing happens in India.
In cross-border selling, how fast can Indian sellers deliver to customers in the US?
If sellers opt for FBA, we don’t deliver from India, we deliver from the US. Indian sellers ship their products ahead of time into the FC in the US and they are done. When it is in our FCs, we can deliver it to customers in two days or within two hours for Prime Now customers. The quality of the product offered and the promise made by the Indian seller is now the same as any of the other products offered by Amazon in the US.
That’s transformative compared to shopping on an external site, where the waiting time for delivery is very long.
The difference in the Global Selling Programme is that you are ‘Buying Globally but Shopping Locally.’