Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels

Super apps will take Amazon-Reliance rivalry to next level

- Nachiket Kelkar

The 21st century is going to be the Indian century,” said Amazon’s Jeff Bezos during a visit to India in January 2020. He might have figured it out long before, as his investments are not limited to the billions of dollars he pumped into Amazon’s Indian business. Amazon Holdings, for instance, acquired a 5 per cent stake in department store chain Shoppers Stop in 2017. A year later, it acquired the hypermarket chain More from Aditya Birla Group through Samara Capital. In 2019, it picked up a 49 per cent stake in retailer Future Group’s promoter company Future Coupons.

Amazon is now aggressively wooing small and neighbourhood merchants to its platform with the Local Shops on Amazon programme launched in April 2020. In a year, it has brought in 50,000 offline sellers and neighbourhood shops. “We have been very excited by the success of this programme, which we launched during Covid. It has been adopted by tens and thousands of local shops around us. We are committing to bringing one million local shops online on Amazon by 2025,” said Amit Agarwal, senior vice president and country manager of Amazon India.

Amazon’s push to partner with the vast, unorganised brick and mortar retail market is hardly surprising. Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries last year launched JioMart, an e-commerce platform, which has inked partnerships with a million merchants. Then there is Flipkart, now owned by the American supermarket giant Walmart, which is also going hyperlocal through its Flipkart Quick Service. It is ramping up Flipkart Wholesale, its digital B2B marketplace, and has recently started offering grocery on the app.