 "Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos")
Jeff Bezos has upped the ante in his bid to win India’s e-commerce market by propping up Junglee, the comparison shopping engine, to become a platform for individuals to buy and sell goods to each other, with Amazon managing payments and delivery.
Bezos, who has realised that India is the last large open market left to conquer, will take on OLX, which is backed by South African internet firm Naspers, a large investor in rival Flipkart, and Quikr, backed by hedge fund Tiger Global.
With Junglee, Bezos will also get access to millions of price sensitive consumers in the urban market. This could help it overcome India’s foreign direct investment norms that ban discounts.
It also adds 100,000 offline sellers, giving Amazon more firepower against Flipkart, which does not have a presence in this space. However, Flipkart could potentially bank on OLX, which has market access in 40 countries, to fend of Amazon. Snapdeal has its very own peer-to-peer platform Shoppo.
Amazon confirmed that it has piloted Junglee’s end-to-end business model in Bengaluru.
“With this service we are placing a bold bet in organising peer-to-peer selling and buying in India. Customers can now use this service to create listings for free and also enable shipping and online payments through Junglee,” said an Amazon spokesperson.
Junglee will utilise Amazon’s existing logistics and payment solutions to service customers and offer them an experience similar to that of buying new products on Amazon. The company will also offer customers a seven-day return in case products are defective or not as described.
OLX, which claims market leadership in India, estimates that Indians stock ~78,300 crore worth of used goods, what it calls Brown Money, which can potentially be sold on marketplaces.
Quikr has gone into vertical play by offering end-to-end services across auto, jobs and real estate by acquiring smaller companies. OLX did not comment immediately. Pranay Chulet, founder of Quikr did not respond to calls or SMS messages.
Amazon has been buying time in deploying Junglee in India, since it bought the platform from Indian-born technology entrepreneurs Anand Rajaraman, Venky Harinarayan, Rakesh Mathur and Ashish Gupta in 1998, valued at $250 million.
It launched the site in India as a comparison shopping engine in 2011, two years before Amazon started its marketplace here.
So far, Amazon, which has lost China to local businesses, has committed $5 billion of investment in India in an attempt to overtake Flipkart and Snapdeal. Bezos has on several occasions commended the India team, saying there were more new things to come.
