Amazon is making its Local Shops program more robust this festive season

Ahead of the festive season, Amazon has introduced a suite of new features to enhance the onboarding experience for sellers as well as enable them to operate across multiple locations via the Local Shops programme.

“The rollout of 1-click onboarding, multi-location fulfilment, and storefront capabilities for sellers underscores our long-term commitment to them,” said Abhishek Jain, head of Local Shops, at Amazon India.

With the new '1-Click Local Shops Onboarding' feature, new sellers can enrol their account on the programme through the Seller mobile app via a single click, thereby enabling quick delivery within their city. This feature is also available to sellers who may have opted out of the programme in the past and want to return to selling their products to customers in their city.

 

Amazon has also added unconventional product categories to ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ to cater to the customers who prefer to buy such products from a seller in their neighbourhood or city because of factors such as speed, and store familiarity. These categories include home inverter batteries, automotive batteries, cooktops, lighting, solar panels, cycles, mirrors, sanitaryware, and tiles and paints.

Amazon India is also simplifying the operations for retailers who operate with multiple offline stores. Such sellers can now simply operate a single account on Amazon and ship out their products from multiple offline locations. Sellers can also list unique regional selections and decide how and where they will ship these orders.

For its customers, Amazon has enhanced the store-led shopping experience through Seller Storefronts, a feature available to all sellers on Amazon. These storefronts automatically curate the seller's product offerings into sections like recommended buys, new arrivals, and best sellers. They also display the seller's location (locality and city) and allow both customers and sellers to share the storefront across platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram using the social sharing button, driving more traffic.

Customers can also access the Seller Storefront offline through a QR code installed in physical stores, which directly links to the seller's online store. Offering an online channel ensures customers can continue purchasing from the seller at their convenience.

“The success of our Local Shops programme is a proof of how kiranas can achieve success with digital commerce, while continuing their traditional mode of offline retail,” said Jain.

Launched in April 2020, ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ has enabled offline retailers and neighbourhood stores to reap the benefits of e-commerce. It helps them supplement existing footfalls at their stores with a digital presence on Amazon.in and expand their reach beyond their normal catchment.

“The 'Local Shops on Amazon' serves as a bridge between traditional brick-and-mortar stores and the vast online marketplace of Amazon,” Jain said.

“Through this programme, retail and local stores can list and sell their products online, offering a wider customer reach than earlier,” he said.

Over the past four years, Local Shops programme has expanded to 344 cities across India, including top metros as well as Tier-2 and 3 cities. These include places such as Sangli, Osmanabad, Jamnagar, Gorakhpur, Jabalpur, Ratlam, Bikaner, Guwahati, Howrah, Tumkur, Jalpaiguri, Ernakulam, Kanchipuram, Patna, Rajkot, Agra and Dehradun.

The programme was introduced by Amazon in India during the early stages of the pandemic to help small neighbourhood stores transition to an online presence and maintain their business operations during the unprecedented disruptions. Today, over 3.5 lakh offline retailers and neighbourhood shops are part of this programme, offering products across categories like fresh flowers, home and kitchen products, furniture, books and toys, healthcare, and apparel.