Amazon SMB Impact Report Notes That Over 4,000 Indian Sellers Crossed Rs 1 Cr in Sales Amid COVID-19

Amazon has published its latest 2020 Small and Medium Business (SMB) Impact Report that highlights how the sellers and other partners interacted with the platform this year amid the COVID-19 crisis. The company says that roughly 1.5 lakh new sellers joined Amazon India this year, while 4,152 Indian merchants surpassed Rs 1 crore in sales in the last eleven months. Notably, the report highlights that the number of crorepati sellers in India grew 29 percent year-on-year. Over the last few months, the e-commerce giant has launched several initiatives to aid SMBs on its platform. For instance, the company in November launched a performance-based benefits initiative STEP to help the seven lakh sellers on its platform to accelerate their growth.

Similarly, the Amazon SMB Impact report adds that emerging brands on Amazon Launchpad saw their business grow by 135 percent annually, while women entrepreneurs under Saheli programme witness 15x growth. Weavers and artisans part of Karigar programme saw their business grow by 2.8X the company said. During the Amazon Great Indian festival that took place in October, more than 1,24,000 sellers from 6,542 pin-codes across India received an order. The company adds that several Indian sellers also saw growth on Amazon Global, therefore pushing ‘made in India’ products worldwide. During the annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale globally, Indian exporters on Amazon Global registered over 50 percent YOY growth in sales. “Indian sellers witnessed nearly 3X surge in demand across North America, EU Middle East and North Africa,” the reported noted. Interestingly, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) emerged a major platform for independent writers. By the end of November, Indian authors cumulatively earned over Rs 45 crores through books published on KDP, therefore growing over 2x YoY.

Speaking about the 2020 Small and Medium Business report, Manish Tiwary, Amazon India VP said, “It is heartening to see how consumers across India have engaged with Amazon in the last year, whether it was to buy things that they needed, consume digital content from Prime Video and Kindle, use Alexa in their daily lives and more. Through this challenging year, we introduced several innovations and measure to help our SMB partners serve customers and it is the customer trust and engagement with Amazon that reflects in the success of lakhs of entrepreneurs, small businesses and content creators included in this report.”

Earlier this year, Amazon had pledged to invest $1 billion to digitise 10 million SMBs in India. The company says that more than one lakh developers from India are building for Alexa globally.

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