Over 1100 new product launches, wide range of finance options in Amazon Great Indian Festival this year

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STORY HIGHLIGHT

  • Manish Tiwary, VP, Amazon India explains what is unique about the Great Indian Festival this time.

What is the USP of this time’s Amazon Great Indian Festival?

‘Great Indian Festival’ starts from October 17, 2020 and Prime members will get early access starting October 16, 2020.
This year, lakhs of Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs) will offer unique selection to customers helping them rebuild and accelerate their business in tough times. Over 4 crore products from Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs); products from over 20,000 local shops across 100 cities will available during Great Indian Festival. Customers across the country will have the opportunity to shop for unique products from thousands of Amazon sellers under various programs such as Local Shops, Amazon Launchpad, Amazon Saheli, and Amazon Karigar and enjoy deals/offers extended by lakhs of small businesses.

Can you mention a few never seen before offers?

Customers can support small businesses by shopping from hundreds of SMB deals and save big with rewards which they can redeem during the sale (10% cashback up to INR 100*). Customers can shop for Sambalpuri sarees from Odisha, Robotic vacuum cleaners from ILIFE, Haircare products from Arata Beauty, Sling Bags & Cross-Body Bags from DailyObjects, Exercise bikes & Dumbbells from Kilkfit, Handcrafted Shoes from Agra, Memory Foam mattresses from Insleep, Jewelry from Swara Creations, Cushion Covers from STITCHNEST, Kurti sets from Kushal K, Health & wellness products from Dr. Vaidya’s New Age Ayurveda, Live plants and planters from Ugaoo and more.

Are there any exclusive Amazon launches? In all what is the number of participating brands, across how many categories?

Customers can experience never ending excitement with new deals being announced every day from the biggest brands across categories including work / study / stay at home products like laptops, tablets, smartphones, furniture, headphones etc. Customers can shop for large appliances – air purifiers, TVs, Washing machines, Dishwashers and more from the comfort of their homes. They can select from a wide range of apparel, fashion accessories and beauty products.

Amazon Great Indian Festival will help SMBs rebuild and accelerate their business in tough times

Customers can look forward to over 1100 new product launches from top brands such as SamsungOnePlusApple, Boat, JBL, Sony, Sennheiser, Dabur, LG, IFB, Hisense, Titan, Max Fashion, BIBA, Spykar, Panasonic, Eureka Forbes, Woscher, Lakme, Bigmuscles, Cosmic Byte, Maggie, Tide, Realme, Microsoft Xbox, Westland, Harper, XiaomiOPPO, Sanyo, GoPro, Honor, Bosch, Amazfit, Peter England, Levi’s, River, Amazon Basics, URBN, Biotique, Pan Mcmillan, Carmate, Bikeblazer and more. New launches from Amazon Devices including all new Amazon Echo Dot, Echo Dot with clock, Amazon Echo, the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite with Alexa Voice Remote Lite.

Can you reflect upon the affordable finance options and Amazon Pay offers?

Customers can look forward to a wide range of affordable finance options from 10% instant bank discount on HDFC Bank Debit & Credit cards and EMI transactions, no-cost EMI on Debit & Credit cards and Bajaj FinServ, exchange offers, exciting offers from other leading Credit/Debit cards and lots more. Customers can win daily shopping rewards worth INR 500 using Amazon Pay UPI, send gifts and extend budget with Amazon Pay Later and Amazon Pay ICICI bank Credit card during the Amazon Great Indian Festival.

With so many businesses struggling for survival, are there any special efforts taken by Amazon to support the local small and medium businesses?

The Great Indian Festival has already started for SMBs, where customers can show their support by shopping from hundreds of SMB deals and save big with rewards which they can redeem during the sale (10% cashback up to INR 100*). Customers can shop for Sambalpuri sarees from Odisha, Robotic vacuum cleaners from ILIFE, Haircare products from Arata Beauty, Sling Bags & Cross-Body Bags from DailyObjects, Exercise bikes & Dumbbells from Kilkfit, Handcrafted Shoes from Agra, Memory Foam mattresses from Insleep, Jewelry from Swara Creations, Cushion Covers from STITCHNEST, Kurti sets from Kushal K, Health & wellness products from Dr. Vaidya’s New Age Ayurveda, Live plants and planters from Ugaoo and more.
This year, lakhs of Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs) will offer unique selection to customers helping them rebuild and accelerate their business in tough times. Over 4 crore products from Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs); products from over 20,000 local shops across 100 cities will available during Great Indian Festival. Customers across the country will have the opportunity to shop for unique products from thousands of Amazon sellers under various programs such as Local Shops, Amazon Launchpad, Amazon Saheli, and Amazon Karigar and enjoy deals/offers extended by lakhs of small businesses.
From a seller’s perspective, what’s important at this time is to save lives & livelihood. With the opening up of ecommerce, it helps our community of more than 6.5 lakh sellers get back into business in a relatively safer way. We continue to take steps to help our sellers navigate this challenging situation.
* On demand disbursement – As sellers on Amazon.in jump start their business; we have enabled an ‘on demand disbursement’ feature that enables sellers to get their disbursements daily.
* Fee Waivers – 50% waiver on ‘Sell on Amazon’ fees for small sellers to help them manage their working capital better. We have also waived off several other fees to make it convenient for our sellers
– Storage Fees and Long term storage fees at Amazon FCs
– Amazon Business Advisory Fees
– Program fee waiver for startups part of our Launchpad initiative
* Relaxation Measures – We also rolled out a number of relaxation measures for sellers to have the flexibility to file for claims, reimbursements etc
* Reward Programme – We also rolled out a programme to reward sellers for every essential products sold through Amazon FCs. We offered INR 15 to INR 35 as reward per unit for different products.
* Performance Metrics – We took several steps across the board to mitigate any negative impact on sellers’ performance metrics including relaxing our policies around order cancellation and returns to better support our seller partners through this period

Can you share some interesting trends observed in the online buying behavior during and post lockdown?

At this moment in time, our focus is to ensure our customers get all that they need safely and that we are able to strongly help our small business partners with their business revival to manage through these challenging times. Customers recognize that ecommerce is the safest way for them to get what they need, and sellers know that e-commerce is the best way for them to serve their customers as their footfalls have been impacted.
We are seeing a 50% increase in new seller registrations vs pre COVID19. The sellers on Amazon.in have been receiving orders for consumer electronics, study from home essentials, kitchen & home appliances, smart devices, laptops, mobile phones, phone accessories, personal grooming products, apparel and more besides groceries and other essential products.

As always the orders would be plenty during the Great Indian Festival, what are your plans to manage the logistics safely and reliably as we are still in the pandemic?

We place tremendous value and focus on the well-being and safety of our employees and contractors around the world as we face the challenges associated with COVID-19. We are working closely with authorities to ensure we are taking the right precautions and have implemented a series of preventative health measures for employees, associates and partners at our sites such as adherence to social distancing norms, use of face covering, and daily temperature screenings in our operations sites among other measures.
We are gearing up to manage this increased demand while we ensure the safety of our associates and customers. In order to ensure safe and reliable deliveries, and serve customer demand during Great Indian Festival, Amazon has ramped up its delivery infrastructure adding close to 200 delivery stations and added tens of thousands of delivery partners to its network. Amazon.in expanded its fulfilment footprint with more than 60 fulfilment centres in 15 states offering a storage capacity of over 32 million cubic feet to serve customers in the farthest parts of the country. Further, Amazon India announced 5 new sort centres and expansion of 8 existing sort centres across the country to strengthen fulfilment capacity.
In addition to this, we have created more than 100,000 seasonal job opportunities ahead of the festive season across our operations network in the country. The new seasonal positions will help elevate our delivery experience and boost the company’s fulfilment and delivery capabilities to meet the surge in customer demand this festive season.

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