Amazon India recently piloted its AmazonNow grocery service in Pune and became the first foreign company to start a food retail venture in the country. Amidst the talks of Walmart partnering with Flipkart for retail business in India, Amazon India has already started to expand its hyperlocal grocery business across the country.
Amazon India has added 15 new fulfilment warehousing centres to create a specialised network for its AmazonNow grocery delivery business. The US-based e-commerce company is looking to retail locally produced and packaged food products through its offline as well as online channels. The company is expected to be in sync with its plans for food retail business model in the country.
Amazon Opens 15 New Fulfilment Centres For AmazonNow
The 15 new AmazonNow fulfilment centres are based in the four cities where the Amazon grocery service is available as of now – Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad. The AmazonNow service will take on established players like BigBasket, Supr Daily and Grofers.
Amazon’s overall warehousing capacity has now increased to 56 fulfilment centres (FCs) across 13 states. The storage space of these warehouses totals to 13.5 million cubic feet, way ahead of Flipkart’s.
The recently launched AmazonNow alone will get 120,000 cubic feet of storage space to back the delivery service. The new fulfilment centres will have different temperature controlled zones, a first for Amazon in India. The new warehousing centres will store and deliver perishable products like fruits, vegetables, dairy products and frozen products.
The AmazonNow app will now offer a wider range of products like fruits, vegetables, dairy products and other daily essentials. The company tied up with stores such like HyperCity to deliver these items in the cities where it does not have temperature-controlled warehouses.
AmazonNow will offer up to 5,000 varieties of consumables, apart from its curated items across beauty, kitchen and home items, and even smartphones. The company plans to create a network specifically for daily essentials, to be able to better serve its customers in key metros.
The company is also ready to roll out its food retailing business in India, Amazon Retail. The entity will sell the Amazon food products and will most likely be a seller on AmazonNow.
The move from Amazon India of adding 15 dedicated fulfilment centres reflects Amazon’s focus on the expansion of grocery segment in the country!
Flipkart Surpasses Amazon To Become The Top Smartphone Seller in India
Smartphones are among of the top-selling items on Indian e-commerce portals. Here, Flipkart is way ahead of Amazon in the race. Last year, over half the smartphones sold online in India, were sold via Flipkart.
As per the data revealed by Market intelligence firm Counterpoint Research, Amazon is on the second spot with 33 percent and China-based Xiaomi’s website Mi.com was a distant third with 10 percent.
However, though Flipkart secured an overall lead, Amazon is leading in the premium smartphone segment with 63 percent of the shipments in the high-end handsets segment in 2017.
Among the mobile brands sold online, Xiaomi took the first spot. The Chinese brand had the highest market share online at 44 percent in 2017, where its shipments grew 219 percent from the previous year. Redmi Note 4 and Redmi 4 were the most sold online devices in 2017.
Overall, the online phone sales have seen a 23 percent rise in India in 2017. The contribution of online channels to overall smartphone sales currently is only a third of total smartphone sales, and hence the brands are relying on a hybrid offline-online sales model this year!