12,000 sellers from India selling under Amazon's global programme

Online retail major Amazon India on Friday said about 12,000 merchants from the country are selling their products in international markets under its global selling programme.

The programme, launched in May last year, with 200 sellers, has grown to about 12,000, Amazon India Director and General Manager (Seller Services) Gopal Pillai told PTI. This represents about 12% of Amazon India's merchant base that stands at about one lakh.

Under the programme, sellers can sell their products across nine international marketplaces, including those in the US, the UK, Japan, Canada and France.

Products like handicrafts, ethnic wear and jewellery are some of the products that see significant traction for these sellers.

The company on Friday launched another programme for sellers called 'Amazon Connect' to offer them an integrated platform to interact with the Amazon.in's senior leadership.

"The programme will also help sellers better understand our seller-centric products and services as well as emerging trends in e-commerce. The objective is to enable sellers to grow profitably on Amazon.in," he said.

Talking about the festive season, Pillai said the company expects its sellers to see similar growth trends like last year.

"The festive season of 2015 saw some sellers registering 3X-5X growth in sales and this year, we expect a similar trend," he said adding that sales during the festive season were bigger than those seen in the entire year.

The US-based e-tailer has been expanding its operations in India at an aggressive pace.

Betting big on the burgeoning e-commerce market in India, its chief Jeff Bezos had said the company will invest $3 billion in India, taking its total investment committed here to over $5 billion.

The India operations has witnessed a 250% year- on-year growth in bringing new sellers on board. It has also added new fulfilment centres, from 21 at the beginning of the year to 23, to expand its warehousing capacity. This will be further expanded to 27 by year-end.