Bengaluru: At its flagship annual summit Amazon Smbhav, Amazon India announced the launch of Smart Commerce – a new initiative to transform local stores into Digital Dukaans, and accelerate its pledge to digitize 1 crore small businesses by 2025. Over 1.5 lakh neighborhood stores are already selling online using Amazon.in. With Smart Commerce, stores can now go further and digitize their offline operations, provide enhanced in-store shopping experience to their walk-in customers, and create their own online storefronts to serve customers directly. Stores of any size can now take advantage of best of Amazon’s shopping innovations, logistics, digital payments and more to provide a reliable and trustworthy experience to their customers no matter where they are — in their physical store, directly through their own online storefront, or on Amazon.in.
In the coming weeks, Smart Commerce will release its first set of solutions to help local stores digitize billing and inventory management, and deliver an enhanced in-store experience to their customers. This will be followed by the launch of capabilities enabling them to create their own online storefront within minutes, and serve their customers through a simple voice and chat-based shopping experience.
Amit Agarwal, SVP, India and Emerging Markets, Amazon said, “We are humbled by how neighborhood stores from across India are taking advantage of our Local Shops on Amazon program to go online and grow their business, with over 1.5 lakh stores already selling on Amazon.in within two years of launch. Today, we are excited to launch Smart Commerce that will enable any store to truly become a digital dukaan, and serve customers with the best of Amazon no matter where they are – in their physical store, directly through their own online storefront, or on Amazon.in. We are just getting started and remain committed to our pledge to digitize one crore small businesses by 2025.”
At the inaugural Smbhav Summit in January 2020, Amazon pledged to digitize 10 million MSMEs, generate $10 billion in cumulative exports from India and create 2 million jobs in India by 2025. The Company is on track to fulfil these pledges and even go beyond in some areas. Amazon recently doubled its Exports pledge from $10 billion to $20 billion in the same time frame.
Manish Tiwary, Country Manager, India Consumer Business, Amazon India said, “Over the last two years, we have invested significantly towards the pledges we announced at the inaugural Smbhav Summit in 2020. We are humbled to share that we have already digitized over 4 million small businesses and local stores, are on track to enable $5 billion in cumulative exports and have created over 1.16 million direct and indirect jobs in India including 135K new jobs added in the last one year.”
