Amazon wants to be the go to e-commerce marketplace for everyone
Amazon wants to be the go to e-commerce marketplace for everyone

Global ecommerce giant Amazon has said that it would continue to focus on every geographic segment of India's online retail market just days after homegrown rival Flipkart earmarked the country's vast rural hinterland and smaller cities as its future growth markets.

Amit Agarwal, Head, Amazon India, said,  "Our ambition in India is to become everything for everyone. We don't think that way (whether the time has come in India's ecommerce market to target particular segments of customers). We believe customers, wherever they are in India, should be able to buy and get products delivered to them."

Amazon had earlier said that the company would ramp up its network of delivery hubs to service the increasing number of orders from smaller towns.

Nitin Seth, Chief Operating Officer, Flipkart, said, "Ecommerce is no more a large city phenomenon: Our strategy is focused on middle India."

Flipkart and Amazon, the two largest ecommerce players in the country, are running neck and neck in the South Asian nation's promising online retailing market that is expected to swell to $103 billion by 2019-20 from $26 billion at present, according to Goldman Sachs. In the crucial Diwali sales during October, Flipkart announced that it had sold 15.5 million units, compared with Amazon's 15 million units.

He said, "The differentiator is about how you deliver the customers' needs and not in trying to create formats. Amazon does that globally and we have been successfully doing that, and India is no different."

Agarwal, who earlier this month was promoted to senior vice president at Amazon, said his company wants Amazon.in to be a platform for anyone trying to find anything.

He said, "We want customers to be able to find, discover and buy anything online and any seller to sell anything online that is compliant and legal. If a washing machine breaks down and you are missing a part, you should be able to find it on Amazon and if you want to replace the whole washing machine, you should find that as well. We are not a part store or washing machine store but we are the biggest selection."

 
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