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The ecommerce battle in India is being fought on many fronts. Discounts, personalisation, onboarding sellers, and so on. But the real race is in logistics. The winner will be the one who gives consistently better experiences to both buyers and sellers – with efficient warehousing, smart inventory management, and most of all, faster delivery.
Today, the multinational behemoth announced seven new fulfilment centers (FCs) or warehouses in Ahmedabad, Delhi, Kolkata, Nagpur, Gurgaon, Pune, and Mumbai. Amazon now has 20 FCs across 10 Indian states, covering an area of over 1.6 million square feet with a storage capacity of nearly four million cubic feet.
What these FCs do is bring warehousing closer to sellers, and therefore, their goods closer to buyers. Transport is a huge bottleneck in India. So, right from June 2013 when it entered India, Amazon began investing in infrastructure to tackle the problem.
Amazon was forced to adopt a 100% open marketplace in India because of restrictions on foreign direct investment (FDI) in online retail. Its Indian ecommerce rivals Flipkart and Snapdeal also adopted the marketplace model which has proved to be a big factor in scaling up fast.
“Sellers on our marketplace have been witnessing exponential growth largely powered by our Fulfilled by Amazon service contributing more than 75% of total units,” says Amit Agarwal, VP and country manager of Amazon India.
The launch of the seven new FCs comes before the upcoming shopping season of Diwali.
