Amazon enters the Indian e-commerce Market - So what?
In the wee hours of the 5th of June, the cyberspace was abuzz with Amazon.in, which popped up out of nowhere. One particular post on Facebook summed it for me -
The Baap of e-commerce is here! www.amazon.in kick starts with Books, Movies and TV! Go shop. Now!
Yes. The proverbial Baap of e-commerce companies has arrived to India. So Horizontal is Amazon.com, that you can find the offerings of a Google Play store (the recently launched App store), iTunes (for the music) clubbed with any top e-commerce company in the world, all in one portal. In fact, they've just announced that they will be trying their hand at food delivery (US only).
There is a great assortment of things that Amazon armada sells online and docking their battleships at the ports of the Indian e-commerce space would be an ominous sign for almost any e-commerce site in India. Right?
Well, maybe. The current manifestation of Amazon in India is a marketplace model and NOT a retail model. Sources at Amazon have told us that this is because of the stringent FDI laws in India for online businesses. While some rules for a foreign company to sell offline in India was recently relaxed, the story for selling online is still riddled with stringent measures against FDI. Essentially, a foreign multi-brand retailer cannot sell directly to Indian customers online. So Amazon.in is a kind of a platform service provider for merchants to sell their goods online.
As of now, a merchant can sell a book or a movie on Amazon. A consumer buys it and the profit is shared between Amazon and the vendor. The fulfillment part of the purchase, which includes maintaining the availability of stock to delivery of the product, is done, for most current products, by Amazon itself.
The India site provides users with the conventional Amazon experience. Of course, the product assortments isn't as much as what users will be used to seeing with Amazon.com. But, if not for the name of the URL and the relatively small product assortment, the current Amazon.in site isn't very different to the Amazon.com site, which brings me to my next point.
Three stories of Amazon's love affair with customer satisfaction
If there ever was a company which put customer delight as the highest priority, Amazon would definitely be one of them. Here are three stories to illustrate this claim -
1) Jim had bought music CDs from Amazon a few years back. Amazon then writes back to Jim, offering him with the mp3 versions of all the songs saying, "you've bought the digital rights to this album for personal use. You might find these songs in digital format useful."
2) Another time, bob had a tough time using the Amazon movie player on a browser. After bob finished his session on Amazon, he gets an e-mail from them, saying "Hey bob, we know you've had it tough with our products. As compensation we have refunded the amount of money to you
bank. We will strive to make the experience better for you and please keep using our services."3) Another example that really brings out the eye to detail which Amazon has, lies in the sidebar of all Amazon.com sites. This is a list of product categories. By hovering on top of a section, information about it pops up on the right of the side bar. Once you've hovered long enough the pop up doesn't change if you diagonally move the mouse by mistake (try it). Other sites still oversee this problem and it is one of the reasons there hover pop ups is bad for user experience.
The point of these three stories is that Amazon is the epitome of customer delight for an e-commerce company. By solving problems the users knew they never had, Amazon delights it's users over time.
In the current arrangement, there isn't much that Amazon.in has or will have will be uniquely their own. Other e-commerce players have spent time in the market and might even have the edge is customer service, in terms of delivery, assistance, troubleshooting etc. For instance, Flipkart has an advantage over Amazon currently in terms of quicker deliveries but Amazon is yet to bring its own logistics into the fray.
But no other e-commerce company delights like Amazon and I believe that is going to be Amazon.in's greatest pull for a "do it for me" market like India.
