Amazon opens its global B2B platform for Indian sellers & exporters

US online retail giant Amazon has expanded its global selling programme in India by enabling its local sellers to tap business clients in markets such as the US, Europe and Japan.

Even though Amazon had opened up its global platform to Indian sellers in 2015, they were allowed to ship products only to the end consumers. The company has now opened the platform for business-to-business (B2B) channels as well, as it sees an uptick in demand in that segment.

“We want to help Indian exporters and sellers reach business buyers across the world,” said Peeyush Nahar, Vice President, B2B Marketplace Business at Amazon. “We’ve been piloting a programme to help a small set of sellers reach businesses to see how that would work. We’ve now reached around 2,000 sellers and have seen enough positive things to go ahead and expand the service.”

The 2,000 sellers that Amazon has picked for this global B2B selling programme are a subset of the 35,000 Indian sellers who now ship products to consumers in other countries. The company says, the experience for sellers will be largely similar, with a few additions such as enabling bulk orders and being able to price products differently for businesses.

In 2017, Amazon said, a quarter of the revenues its sellers earned on its platform globally came from cross-border transactions. The company’s B2B business also outpaced the company’s overall 31 per cent revenue growth in the year, representing a big opportunity and also allowing it to take on rivals such as eBay and Alibaba.

This has led to Amazon to encourage its sellers more and more to ship products overseas and not just in India. On the B2B global selling front, the company says it has tapped several Fortune 500 companies as well as small businesses, giving its sellers a good mix of customers to cater to.

For Indian sellers, Amazon says, it will take care of the cross border shipping, cross border transactions and after-sales service if they’re willing to do business overseas. This will also reduce the complexities for sellers from India as they won’t have to encounter the hassle of winning orders, signing contracts and going through the procurement ordeal.

The US firm is looking to tap sellers of products such as apparel, linen, scientific and measuring instruments and tools to name a few in India. Nahar said that India has prowess in manufacturing certain items which are required globally and they can do so while bringing a good value proposition for business buyers on its platform.

“More sellers will offer more options which is one of our core propositions to the customer. What we are doing in India is creating the awareness about the opportunity so whoever is interested can participate,” said Gopal Pillai, Director of Sellers Services at Amazon India. “We are also going to clusters where there is dense population of manufacturers of a particular type of product and we are onboarding them.”

While Amazon has launched its global seller programme across several geographies, for India, the company says it is doing things differently considering a lot of sellers are small and medium enterprises. Amazon has customised its platform to allow these sellers to get easy currency conversions, translation services for listing products in Europe and Japan. It is even offering a marketplace for service providers who can help sellers with cross-border taxation.

Over 10 per cent of Amazon’s current base of 300,000 sellers in India are today selling products to consumers outside the country. With the B2B, they can now potentially tap the businesses customers as well, the company said. Besides, the company is also continuing to focus on growing its base of global sellers out of India, which has grown by around 250 per cent in the past two years.