Prime Day: Amazon India sees highest participation from small businesses

Customer from 96 per cent pincodes of India place orders during Amazon's Prime Day event

E-commerce giant Amazon witnessed the biggest response for its flagship event Prime Day this year in India. Prime Day 2021 marked the most Small Medium Businesses (SMBs) selling on Amazon.in ever, as they saw an overwhelming response from Prime members.

Amazon competes with players such as Walmart-owned Flipkart, Reliance’s JioMart and Tata-owned BigBasket to tap the booming online retail market as the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the adoption of e-commerce across the country.

The customers from over 96 per cent pincodes of India placed orders. The month leading up to Prime Day became Prime Video’s best ever viewership period.Also there were the highest number of listeners for Prime Music.

During lead up and on Prime Day, Prime members shopped from 126,003 sellers including artisans, weavers, women entrepreneurs, start-ups and brands, local offline neighbourhood stores. This included sellers from all over India including those from tier 2-3-4 cities like Barnala (Punjab), Champhai (Mizoram) and Virudhunagar (Tamil Nadu). The other such places include Guntur (Andhra Pradesh), Valsad (Gujarat), and Shajapur (Madhya Pradesh). About 31,230 sellers saw their highest ever single day sales and nearly 25 per cent more sellers’ grossed sales over Rs 1 crore as compared to the last Prime Day.

“Prime members shopped from more than 126,000 SMBs and stores from across (over) 6,800 pin-codes, making it the biggest ever sales for small medium businesses (SMBs) on Amazon,” said Akshay Sahi, director, prime and fulfillment experience, Amazon India. 

Prime Day continues to be a unique opportunity for brands of all sizes to launch new products. There were new product launches from over 300 top Indian and global brands. Prime members had access to brands like the OnePlus Nord 2 5G, Samsung Galaxy (M31s) boAt Airdopes, Mi 3i 20000 mAh power bank, Pigeon mini handy and compact chopper.

More than 70 per cent of new Prime members shop from outside of the top 10 cities including towns like Ananthnag (Jammu & Kashmir), Bokaro (Jharkhand), Tawang (Arunachal Pradesh), Mokokchung (Nagaland), Hoshiarpur (Punjab), Nilgiris (Tamil Nadu), Gadag (Karnataka) and Kasargod (Kerala).

“We started our business 2 years back in Amazon Karigar, prior to which we were selling only in local markets catering to limited customer base and had limited income,” said Salman Ali, from ‘Star Fashion JPR’ in Jaipur. “We are extremely delighted with our sales and saw great response for our Block Printed Kurtis selection during Prime Day 2021. Events like Prime Day are a great boost for our small scale business which directly helps revive the lives of our rural artisan community from Rajasthan.”

Personal computing, beauty, apparel, home and kitchen, smartphones and pantry categories were among those that saw the most success in terms of units sold. Work and study from home purchase trends continued with members purchasing laptops, printers, monitors, TVs, wearables and storage. Top brands were HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus, Apple in laptops.Large appliances found favour with members, with top selling brands being LG, Samsung in washing machines and Whirlpool, Samsung in refrigerators.

Sanitization, health and safety continued to be top priority for members. Top selling brands in health,  personal care products and sanitization were Himalaya, Savlon, Dettol, Lifebuoy and Lizol. The top selling brands in smartphones were the OnePlus Nord 2 5G, One Plus Nord CE 5g, Redmi Note 10 series, Redmi 9, Samsung Galaxy M31s, Samsung Galaxy M21 and realme c11.

“We have been operating for the last 4 years and recently came online in 2021. Our team is so excited after seeing huge growth in daily orders during our first ever Prime Day. We saw over a 5X spike in order volume,” said  Brijesh Mishra, from Home UPS, the Chennai part of Local Shops on Amazon program. “We received orders across Chennai and Kanchipuram in 71 pin codes during the event. This has helped in sustaining our livelihood during these tough times.”

Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa answered over 3 million requests from customers during Prime Day on the Amazon Shopping app (Android). It guided them to the products, best deals, new launches, bill payments and Prime Music.

Local language movies – Narappa (Telugu), Sarpatta Parambarai (Tamil) and Malik (Malayalam), were each watched in over 3,200 towns and cities in India and in over 150 countries and territories globally. This  highlighted the growing viewership and popularity of local language films not just in India but also around the world.

Amazon Prime Day 2021

• 126,003 SMBs including Local Shops participated this year in over 2 weeks of lead up and 48 hours of Prime Day.

• More customers signed up for Prime membership.

• over 96% pin codes of India shopped across categories this Prime Day

• 70% of new members from Tier 2-3-4 cities.

• Top categories included personal computing, beauty, apparel, home and kitchen, smartphones and pantry.

• 3 million requests from customers answered by Alexa.

• 3X more Prime members used Amazon Pay products to purchase during day 1.