Bangalore, October 5: As India gets ready for the festive season, Amazon India on Sunday said that more than 1 lakh “Amazon-enabled” local shops, kiranas and neighbourhood stores will be serving customers this year. The company further mentioned that over 20,000 offline retailers, kiranas and local shops will be participating for the first time in the company’s biggest annual sale Great Indian Festival.
“This festive season we are focused on helping our sellers and other MSME partners grow their business and bounce back from the recent challenges…The integration of Amazon’s programs with 100,000+ ubiquitous neighbourhood stores – for selling online, to help customers buy online, to make deliveries and enable contactless payments – is a testament of the adaptability and inventiveness of Indian entrepreneurs,” said Manish Tiwary, VP – Amazon India.
The programme is among a string of initiatives by Amazon such as Amazon Easy (to help local entrepreneurs set up stores), I Have Space (for Kirana stores with additional storage space for Amazon packages and sufficient manpower to deliver them in two-three km radius of their stores), Amazon Pay Smart Stores (to enable digital storefront, contactless payments, and reward coupons to customers) etc., catering to micro and small business sellers.
Recently, digital payments startup for merchants BharatPe said that it is gearing up for loan disbursals ahead of the festive season as it expects MSME sector to revive soon. Even though we are in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and the total cases continue to rise