Amazon, which has already pledged $2 billion for expansion plans in India, has some stellar plans this year. As per reports coming in, Amazon is all set to hire 8000 employees in India, besides launching Amazon Prime services and offering exclusive products on their platform.
Currently, Amazon India has 6000 employees in their logistics and delivery department, which is all set to expand to 14,000 in the next 7 months. By end of March, they will have 9000+ headcount.
Amazon offers Easy Ship facility using which sellers on their platform can easily ship goods to the buyers without any hassles. Easy Ship also supports CoD mode of delivery, which has made it quite popular among the Indian seller base. As of now, 7300 out of 16,000 registered sellers from 284 cities use Easy Ship. Amazon India is looking to make this facility even more robust and better in the coming days.
An Amazon representative said, “We believe it is owed to the profitable growth they see on our platform enabled by logistics services such as FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon India) and Easy Ship.”
Currently, Flipkart has 12,000 employees in logistics and delivery department, which is the largest in India. They collectively ship 85% of all goods sold on their platform.
Indian eCommerce industry is all set to swell to $90 billion (Rs 540,000 crore) by 2019, and hiring across the industry is highly anticipated. Last year in May, we had reported that Indian ecommerce industry will hire 50,000 people in the next 2-3 years, and it seems that the current Amazon hiring plans is perfectly aligning with this projection.
Amazon Prime in India
Amazon Prime is a special annual membership service which assures speedy 2 day delivery of any item, with free shipping, streaming of exclusive digital content such as videos and music, along with ebooks. Right now, consumers in USA are charged $99 per year.
Amazon is all set to introduce Amazon Prime services in India now, as senior officials are already having talks with major entertainment companies in India such as Yash Raj Studios, Eros Entertainment and Sony.
Prime can be loosely compared with Flipkart First, which charges Rs 500 per year, but has no digital content streaming or downloading offer.
But slow Internet speed and the dangers of piracy of exclusive content can be a limiting factor.
There have been some disappointments along the way as well. Kindle sales have been pretty much low in India, as eBooks have yet again failed to take off.
It would be interesting to observe how Amazon decides to devise it’s tactics and strategies, to pen it’s India growth story. Flipkart and Snapdeal would be closely watching them.
[…] Amazon has major plans for India which include rapidly scaling up their India team and launch of Amazon Prime subscription service in India this year and who knows – some of the original movies may be thrown to Indian Prime users as […]
[…] has some stellar plans this year for India. They plan to hire 8000 employees in India, besides launching Amazon Prime services and offering exclusive products on their […]