Amazon’s Offline Push: Partners With Vodafone To Provide Touch & Feel Experience To Hesitant Customers

As per Google’s latest ecommerce report, electronic gadgets are the #1 product category across various ecommerce portals, accounting a massive 27% share. But lack of touch and feel experience has been repeatedly cited as one of the major obstacles for converting an offline centric customer into online centric.

Understanding this logic, Amazon has launched a massive offline campaign to entice and acquire ‘hesitant’ customers who are still not comfortable buying products online. In partnership with Vodafone, Amazon India is inviting their customers to touch and feel the smartphones before ordering it online.

It seems Amazon has taken a cue from Paytm which has been very aggressive in reaching out to offline customers and helping them adapt the digital lifestyle. As we have reported earlier, Paytm has partnered with movie theatres to sell offline tickets via their app, tied up with petrol pumps to increase usage of their digital wallets and even partnered with Delhi Metro to sell Metro Prepaid Cards via their digital platform.

Note here that Flipkart is already ahead of Amazon in terms of offline push as they launched ‘Experience Zones‘ across ten Indian cities to enable their customers to touch and feel products before ordering them.

Amazon – Vodafone Partnership: What is in Store ?

Under the pilot project , Amazon has partnered with 40 Vodafone stores in Bangalore, wherein Amazon will display smartphones which are sold on their portal. Some of the exclusive smartphones which are only available on Amazon such as One Plus 3 would be specially highlighted to attract offline customers.

A specially trained product specialist from Amazon would be present in each of these stores to help and guide customers and assist them in experiencing the smart phones first hand.

Amazon is actually attempting to make friends with those customers who want to have a touch and feel experience of the mobile phones before buying them. To further help them, these customers can directly order these handsets from the store itself, which would be delivered at their home within 24 hours.

Amazon has recently enabled exclusive sales of some best selling smartphones such as Lenovo K4 Note, Redmi Note 3, Coolpad range and Moto G4 Plus. These would be specially displayed at these Vodafone stores to create more buzz and excitement for these products.

Arun Srinivasan, category leader of consumer electronics at Amazon India, said, “With an aim to acquire incremental set of customers who are not yet shopping online, we are focusing on providing them with opportunities to experience the benefits of shopping on Amazon.in and build trust in the brand,”

Mother Diary Goes Online

In a related development, Mother Dairy which is one of the largest dairy products manufacturer in India, has partnered with 9 e-commerce and hyper local delivery portals to sell their products online.

Hence, Mother Diary products such as milk, ice-creams, paneer, ghee, lassi, butter, etc can now be bought online across these 9 e-tailers : Big Basket, Grofers, Ask Me Grocery, Sangam Direct, SRS Grocery, Just Buy Live, Innerchef, Grocer Max, Orange E-Tokri. As per Mother Diary, they have witnessed 10% increase in sale ever since they partnered with e-commerce companies.

Do you think that such offline – online partnerships will be the next big thing in Indian e-commerce market ? Do let us know by commenting right here.