Amazon has finally made an official India debut, but don’t raise your hopes in anticipation that you will have the similar product buying experience as its parent Amazon.com – infact, far from it.
Amazon comes to India as Junglee.com, essentially a shopping comparison engine. According to news broken by Rajat Agrawal of BGR and then featured by medianama, labnol & pluggd, Junglee is a product comparison platform that advertises and compares products from different Indian online retailers. Amazon will not be selling anything directly to consumers right now.
Amazon Product Ads
Instead of calling it a shopping comparison site, Amazon terms Junglee as a platform for “Amazon Product Ads”. One interesting thing to note is that Amazon’s main India domain www.Amazon.in is still not directed to Junglee.com, while the platform is hosted on http://services.amazon.com.
From what I can say, when amazon starts selling its own products in India, it will be hosted on amazon.in, and junglee.com will remain as a third-party product advertising site. Amazon has taken this route currently due to the fact that Multi-Brand retail FDI is still in limbo, and till the time clarity comes on that front, I guess Amazon will be taking this route.
Junglee.com Product & Brand listings
Coming back to Junglee.com, the site clearly states that visitors cannot directly buy from Junglee. It serves as a platform that will display their customer service phone numbers and provide their physical store locations to help buy the products directly from Sellers. Junglee claims to have gone live with over 1.20 crore products and 14k brands from various Indian retailers.
However, it is interesting to note that major Online retailers from India like Flipkart or Infibeam do not have their product listing. Either Amazon has declined to have them on their platform, or these Indian retailers look at amazon as a threat and do not want to help them by bringing on their products. Whatever the reason, we should know it soon enough.
Amazon User Database Integration
One thing is for sure, Amazon is approaching this with a lot of seriousness and Junglee.com foray is a well thought out strategy. They have already integrated their Amazon user database at Junglee.com. So if you are an existing Amazon user comes to Junglee, he/she can use their existing credentials to login.
It would be interesting to know readers views Amazon’s India debut with Junglee.com. Let us know what you think!