4 years of Amazon Business in India: 'Anniversary Sale' from September 24 to 29, says Director Suchit Subhas | See what's in store for consumers in festive season

As Amazon Business completed 4 years in India, the marketplace claims that in the past 4 years over 4 lakh sellers have been benefited from the platform. There is a huge 102 percent CAGR jump, which puts India after US.

Zee Business's Reporter Daanish Anand caught up with Suchit Subhas, Director, Amazon Business, to decode the plans for the upcoming festive season. Edited excerpts:-

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1) It’s been 4 years since Amazon Business started operations in India, how have the MSMEs in India benefited since the inception?

Since its launch in 2017, Amazon Business has onboarded over 4 lakh sellers selling to business customers on Amazon Business. There are over 15 crore GST enabled products on the platform, coupled with a strong delivery network that has presence in 99.6 per cent pincodes in India.

Our focus has been to simplify purchase for businesses and help them reduce cost to improve profitability. Apart from catering to MSME customers, our sellers have also catered to requirements from large enterprises such as Mahindra, GE, Tata Group.

In the last four years,  we have added a host of features such as multi-users account feature to enhance account security and compliance, bulk purchase features, shared payment methods and business analytics tool.

In its four-year journey, Amazon Business has registered millions of businesses as customers in India and has continued to see an exponential growth, with a CAGR of 102 percent in customer base, making the Indian marketplace of Amazon Business the second biggest after US.

We have seen a 39 percent increase in monthly active users, resulting in 69 percent increase in orders and 85 percent increase in sales. We are also encouraged that we have been able to cater to businesses from smaller markets as well and have seen 30 percent buying customers and 25 percent orders from tier 2 and tier 3 cities.  

2) Has the business environment for MSMEs changed in India? What sort of benefits are they getting? How is Amazon planning to digitally support and boost exports for MSMEs?

Amazon has invested a lot of time and effort in enabling MSMEs to benefit from technology adoption – through partnerships with central and state government bodies, partners in the industry and others. 

To digitally support MSMEs, this year we launched Business PAN as an additional license type through which MSMEs with annual turnover of less than Rs 20 Lakhs, Education Institutes and NGOs can register and avail Amazon Business benefits.

We also launched the ‘Bill to Ship to’ feature we have taken a lead in solving this unique customer problem and offered a solution which allow them to claim GST credit on their billing address for their pan-India shipments. This convenient feature allows customers to consolidate the tax credit to one state and make use of GST credit more effectively.

3) What can the government do to make environment better for MSMEs?

We are working together with the government to help e-commerce realize its potential and empower MSMEs to go online. We believe we can enable MSMEs to leverage e-commerce by appropriately structuring incentives that encourage online selling and help with offsetting digital marketing costs and promote ‘ease of doing business online’.

4) Festive trends ahead of festive season?

We complete four years in India and on account of its four-year anniversary, Amazon Business plans to run an ‘Anniversary Sale’ from 24th to 29th September, where customers can avail up to 20 percent cashback on orders above Rs 1500/. We also have multiple deals across different product categories like laptops, printers, televisions, office furnishing, kitchen products, work from home and study from home essentials.

In addition to these business exclusive deals, businesses would continue to save more with GST input tax credit and bulk discounts as part of the anniversary special offer.

With festive season around the corner, Amazon Business has introduced ‘Corporate Gifting Store’ to cater to all the gifting needs of businesses and their office administrations.  

With a wide array of corporate gifting selection across headphones, speakers, wearables, gift hampers, work from home essentials, festive coins, Amazon gift cards and more, Amazon Business offers top deals and great savings with exclusive business deals, GST invoice for input tax credit and bulk purchase discounts.

In addition to that, during Diwali period we will continue to offer great deals and discounts to our customers along with GST input credit and bulk discounts.