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Amazon launches online shopping service in India

Thu Feb 2, 2012 3:30am EST

* Junglee.com to offer more than 12 million products

* Indian e-commerce market seen growing at 47 pct this year

BANGALORE Feb 2 (Reuters) - The world's largest online retailer Amazon.com Inc entered India on Thursday with the launch of its shopping website junglee.com, in a major boost to the country's fast-growing e-commerce market.

Seventeen years after Amazon's online debut, the $88.4 billion retailer entered Asia's third-largest economy where websites such as Flipkart and MakeMyTrip Ltd are leveraging an industry growing at almost 50 percent each year.

Junglee.com will offer more than 12 million products from over 14,000 Indian and global brands, Amazon said in a statement, including the retailer's top-selling Kindle e-book reader.

"We are excited to give customers in India a single online starting point where they can shop a wide selection of products sold by local and global retailers, and make informed purchasing decisions," Amit Agarwal, Amazon.com vice president said in the statement.

Amazon's offering will find itself competing with a foe the company knows well.

Flipkart, India's biggest online bookseller, was founded by two former Amazon employees in 2007. The website, which has expanded into mobile phones, appliances, music and movies, sells 10 products a minute and targets $1 billion in revenue by 2015.

Amazon said last month it was setting up its first warehouses in India, which the company said would make shipments faster and cheaper.

E-commerce has a huge potential in India, a country of more than 1.2 billion people with a bulging middle class and rapidly-rising incomes. The country has only 52 million active Internet users, of which only 40 percent have shopped online.

India's $2 billion book market is growing at around 15 percent a year, while the online industry is expected to grow by 47 percent to more than 460 billion rupees ($9.34 billion) this year, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India.
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Comments (2)
punitkg wrote:
I dont see the major Indian online stores on Junglee.com, better to use sites such as www.pricecheckindia.com

Feb 02, 2012 3:39am EST  --  Report as abuse
Scattershot wrote:
A year-and-a-half into its second coming, Indian e-commerce is starting to exhibit signs of maturity. Leading players have started investing in supply chain and back-end systems in an effort to facilitate a smoother movement of the product or service from the supplier to the consumer. Many are also striving to cut on outsourced delivery.

The same is true for Flipkart.com, India’s poster boy for e-commerce and the country’s answer to online book retailing giant Amazon. Flipkart, whose recent valuations have made headlines recently, says it should be hitting its 2015 revenue target of $1 billion sooner than envisaged.

Having been a part of the country and seeing flipkart grow from a normal book delivery service in Bangalore where I studied is indeed a story to learn from. Indians were averse to spending online. Flipkart had this humungous task to educate the Indian consumer about online shopping. Initially it did very little in terms of media spending and relied only on word-of-mouth. At that point in time in 2010 it was only selling books at discounted rates with free home delivery. Later on when it reached substantial volumes (mid 2011) it started enveloping many other product categories such electronic consumer durables etc. It also positioned itself as a safe transaction hub offering timely delivery, guarantee on products, money back offers to lure in consumers. The Indian consumer who hadn’t seen so much delivered on his platter was sold!

India, with a population of over 1.2 billion, has 100 million Internet users. The country, on an average, sees the launch of three e-commerce websites every month. Also aiding the growth are factors of social networking, increasing internet penetration with the 3G spectrum and the option of a captive audience because of an increased amount of time people spend on the Net. E-commerce in India is expected to touch the Rs 47,000-crore mark by the end of the calendar year.

It was last month that I observed amazon.com setting up a fulfillment center in India as the world’s largest Internet retailer tries to break into the world’s second most-populous nation. Fulfillment centres are giant warehouses that help Amazon and other online retailers store many products, ship them and handle returns quickly. The fulfillment centre is based in Mumbai, the biggest city in the country, according to job listings on Amazon’s India careers website.

With the near dominance of flipkart in the online retail space it will interesting to see what tricks amazon oops junglee.com has up its sleeve.

Feb 02, 2012 5:03am EST  --  Report as abuse
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