The third edition of Amazon Smbhav, Amazon India, with the theme ‘Pragati’ discusses innovation and growth along with exploring ideas to drive India’s success towards development in terms of business. The summit has also announced the launch of Smart Commerce, an initiative to transform local stores into Digital Dukaans. The initiative aims to digitalise 1 crore small businesses by 2025.
Announcing its launch, Amit Agarwal, SVP, India and Emerging Markets, Amazon said, “We are humbled by how neighbourhood 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.”
In the opening session, Manish Tiwary, Country Manager, India Consumer Business, 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 year.” Many India-First innovations such as Seller Flex and Easy Ship have been implemented in global markets as well. Moreover, technology has been used to bring small businesses online. Moreover, most of the customer orders on Amazon are from tier 2 cities. Around 8 million local stores and businesses are using Amazon Pay, with 75% of the customers (tier 2 and tier 3 cities) using Amazon Pay UPI.
Similarly, Dave Clark also emphasised that Amazon has invested more than $18 billion in its selling partners’ success since 2020. Amazon has also digitized more than 4 million small businesses and enabled exports worth nearly $5 billion. To support the idea of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the minister of state in the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, also focused on using technology to create opportunities for youth. As post-COVID reshaped the value chain of products and services, the growth of small businesses and villages would make India Atmanirbhar.