A little over a year after launching Prime in India, Amazon said its loyalty programme has begun paying dividends with subscribers shopping more often and spending more money on an average than non-Prime subscribers.
With Amazon Prime as its biggest hit during the Great Indian Festival sale, the company sold four times as many subscriptions this time as compared to last year. During the first two days of the sale, which kicked off on Thursday, the company said one in three products sold by it were to Prime members.
“Prime has been building up very well in the past one year. During sales we would give its members 30 minutes early access to deals, but this year we gave them a 12-hour head-start. We did this because the number of Prime customers is so large that we needed to give them enough time to shop,” said Manish Tiwary, Vice President of Category Management at Amazon.
While Amazon doesn't reveal data around its Prime subscription service, analysts estimate that on an average in the US, a Prime subscriber spends twice as much ($1,200) in a year when compared to how much a non-Prime user spends ($600). The average spent by e-commerce users in India will be lower.
In terms of Amazon’s overall performance during its latest sale, the company said it sold two and a half times as many smartphones this year when compared to last year. Other standout categories were large appliances where sales grew by four times and fashion grew by seven times.
“These past four days along with the 12 hours of early Prime access has been our biggest shopping event ever. We have around 32 different categories and more than half of these saw more than just doubling of sales when compared to the Diwali sales last year. We saw a very good distribution of sales across categories,” added Tiwary.
Amazon refrained from sharing data around units sold or market share citing the war of words that rivals unleashed to undermine the company’s growth last year. However, it maintained that it was India’s largest marketplace based on number of visitors to its site, app downloads on smartphones and its active base of customers and sellers on its platform.
While the US online retailer has picked up 5 per cent stake in one of India’s leading offline retailers Shoppers Stop, Tiwary said that there was still a long way for Amazon to go in the online Indian retail space before turning its attention to offline retail. However, a commercial deal signed between the two companies that will see Amazon setting up offline experience centres within Shoppers Stop stores, will help the online retailer woo more customers to shop on its platform.
“We are looking at an offline play and the agreement with Shoppers Stop is the first one which will help us with experience centres. We are also working with Vodafone in some cities in a limited way where you can experience some of the smartphones sold on Amazon,” said Tiwary, adding that the intent was to help offline consumers experience Amazon but not sell products offline just yet.