Amazon’s country manager and vice-president, Seller Services Pvt. Ltd Amit Agarwal strongly denies that his country’s decision to invest $2 billion (Rs 12,000 crore) in India, a day after its closest rival Flipkart announced that it had raised $1 billion, was a knee-jerk reaction. Decisions like these are not taken in hours, he says, but are part of a calibrated approach to expand, innovate and extend the company’s footprint in India. Agarwal spoke to Samiran Saha in detail about the company’s operations in and approach for the India market, where Amazon started operations in June last year. Excerpts from the interview:
How would you rate your India stint?
We started with selling books. Today, we sell over 17 million products, including apparel, electronics, household goods and toys. We have a customer-backward approach where our prime focus are the customers and their preferences. At Amazon, we concentrate and work on key customer inputs on their preferred product categories, brand preferences and acceptable price points. We are a customer-obsessed company and our decisions are largely drawn from what our customer matrices tell us. All companies have to think about customers.
How are you different from the other players in the retail space?
We have an enviable network. We serve all our customers equally. We deliver to 19,000 pin codes across the country. There are some places that I didn’t know existed in India. We have seven warehouses and two customer fulfilment centres, in Mumbai and Bangalore, from where we ship our merchandise to customers in a day. These fulfilment centres are a platform for both customers and sellers. It is a win-win for both. Sellers can take care of what they want to sell and at what cost, while customers have an array of choice.
What the fulfilment centres do is provide infrastructural logistics to the seller. He has to decide on the product to sell, price it, pack it and ship it to the fulfilment centre. These centres give us the reach and help us keep our customers delighted.
In which areas would you like to utilise the $2 billion fresh investment that Amazon has made?
The investment will provide us with the momentum and the potential to grow rapidly. It will help us innovate, as it is much needed in this space. It will also help expand our delivery mechanism.
How do you choose the products you want to sell on Amazon?
We need to find ways to sell everything. We started with books and then graduated to other products across categories. We also have to find out what our ecosystem partners can provide us with, so that whenever customers visit our stores they get the best experience and products. Again, our customer-backward approach and fulfilment centres help us figure out what we want to sell. It is a long term opportunity and we have to think in terms of decades.