E-commerce major Amazon on Tuesday announced its foray into quick commerce, joining the race against players like Zomato’s Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, Flipkart Minutes and Zepto. The pilot of the service will start from Bengaluru later this month. The company will announce other details and of the service later. Reports had earlier suggested that Amazon will call service Tez.
“We are excited to start a pilot to give our customers a choice to get their everyday essentials in 15 minutes or less,” Amazon India country manager Samir Kumar said, at the company’s flagship event, Smbhav. “We already have millions of customers across India including Prime Members who trust us and will look forward to this convenience,” he added.
This move by Amazon is expected to intensify competition among the existing players in the $6 billion market.
The company will look to grab some share away from established players. According to a recent study by Motilal Oswal, Blinkit dominates the quick commerce market with a 46% share, followed by Zepto at 29% and Swiggy Instamart at 25%.
Amazon also said it is aiming to take the cumulative exports on its platform from India-based sellers to $80 billion by 2030. This is a major scale-up from its earlier target of $20 billion exports by 2025.
“Motivated by the progress that we made in driving exports out of India…we are going to advance our commitment to enable $80 billion in exports by 2030,” Amit Agarwal, senior vice president of emerging markets at Amazon, said.
He added that the company is collaborating with the Centre, small businesses, D2C brands, as well as other key stakeholders to achieve the target.
“This significant milestone will be driven by a combination of enabling exports through Amazon’s global selling programme for Indian MSMEs, manufacturers and D2C startups as well as sourcing Made-in-India products to be sold on Amazon’s global marketplaces,” Kumar added.
Amazon Global Selling is the company’s flagship e-commerce exports programme and was launched in 2015.
Since its launch, it has onboarded 150,000 exporters from 200-plus cities across India to sell in over 18 countries like US, the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Italy, and France. The total number of products being sold via this is around 400 million.
Earlier in September, the Seattle-based company said that exports on its platform from India will surpass $13 billion by end of this year.
It had also pledged to digitise 10 million small businesses and create 2 million direct and indirect jobs by 2025.
Kumar also said that the company has hit its target to digitise these businesses one year ahead of time and has created nearly 1.4 million direct and indirect jobs in India.
Amazon India also earmarked $120 million from its Smbhav Venture Fund to invest in startups that digitise consumer goods manufacturing in India.
With this, the size of Amazon Smbhav Venture Fund has reached $350 million.
The company had launched the Amazon Smbhav Venture Fund in 2021. Since then, it has invested in companies like The Good Glamm Group, FreshToHome, XYXX, Hopscotch, Fitterfly, Cashify, Acko Insurance, smallcase, and M1xchange, among others.
The company on Tuesday also launched two new services: Amazon Freight and Amazon Shipping.
Amazon Freight, piloted earlier this year in India, would offer full truckload freight services ranging from 5 to 40 feet, for intra-city and inter-city transportation.
Amazon Shipping would provide last-mile delivery services to over 14,000 pin codes with promised delivery dates and pick up experience. It offers pricing, real-time tracking, rescheduling tools, and daily cash on delivery remittance.
This service was piloted in 2021.
“Following successful pilots, both these services are now available to businesses and D2C brands nationwide,” the company said in the announcement.
