Great Indian Festival turning out to be Amazon's biggest-ever event: Tiwary

At a time when tech companies are cutting down spending in an uncertain macroeconomic environment, e-commerce giant Amazon would continue investing in India, said Manish Tiwary, vice president and country manager, Amazon India. In an interview with Peerzada Abrar, Tiwary said that the company’s ongoing month-long sale ‘Great Indian Festival (AGIF) is turning out to be the company’s biggest-ever event. Edited excerpts:

How do you view this year’s ‘Great Indian Festival' (GIF) compared to 2021, 2020 and the pre-covid period of 2019?

It was a very unique period for us. This is the seventh year for me. But this is the first time we were doing it physically, after three years of the pandemic. The sellers were looking forward to the event but were also very nervous. The great news is the AGIF 2022 is turning out very clearly to be our biggest-ever event in terms of value and units sold. It has become the biggest and the best ever event for our key constituents, the people who really matter, which are our sellers and customers. We saw new seller registrations nearly doubling. Close to 70 per cent of them are coming from small towns. More than 23,000 of our sellers have turned into ‘lakhpatis’  in this event itself and it is still not closed. 

How do you see consumer sentiment and consumption growth across categories?

Fashion and home are big categories during the season. Over 4.75 lakh MSMEs benefited from the Amazon Business platform during the festival. It has more than doubled compared to last year. During the first 36 hours of the AGIF event, we saw close to 1.9 times new Prime sign-up vis-a-vis last year, which had a pandemic base. More than 80 per cent of our new customers have come from smaller towns. Till October 18, we had already delivered goods in 99.6 per cent of the serviceable pin codes. We have live shopping (led) by influencers on our app and over 50 lakh people interacted during various programmes. This is important as we go to the next 100 million customers. We are trying to serve both the new Gen Z and the new-to-the-internet kind of customers.  Our voice-assistant Alexa answered over 4 crore requests. It was answering close to 1000 customer queries every minute. Smartphone (purchases) this year has been really good. A large part of it is driven by the 5G announcements and the fact that you now have 5G phones available under Rs 15,000. More than 10 lakh customers actually bought a smartphone on amazon.in for the first time ever. More than 15 lakh customers shopped for fashion for the first time ever during AGIF.

A report by consulting firm Redseer report recently said that Meesho has emerged as the second-largest player by order share during the first week of the festive sale, surpassing Amazon, while Flipkart Group platforms topped the market in both orders and gross merchandise value (GMV).  Before that, a report by Bernstein pointed out that Amazon is behind Flipkart in India as it faces an unfavourable regulatory environment. Your comments?

I don't want to comment on any of these reports. Vis-à-vis last year, when online shopping was at its peak, (now) our every metric, be it related to sellers, customers or  Prime members, is well ahead of the plan. I'm happy if there are other players doing well. E-commerce is still in its infancy stage. But we are always focused on how we can delight our customers and sellers, more than focusing on what the competition is doing. We have a month-long sale as we want to give the customers the widest choice. For instance, for the customers in Kolkata and in the Eastern part of the country, the first 10 days are important till we reach Durga Puja. Now customers in different parts of the country are buying for the Dhanteras festival. There is also Bhai Dooj happening. I feel very happy that we are in sync with what customers want. And I don't want to compare it to some other event which is for two days or x-days. 

There are reports about deliveries by e-commerce firms gone wrong and a lot of delays in the delivery of products. Customers have taken to social media to complain about it. Is it a big concern this time for the e-commerce industry?

I have seen some of it and it is regarding a couple of other players. But it does not involve Amazon. Our track record and delivery continue to be as seamless as it was. When we design an event, we do it with the 'customer backwards' approach first. We will ensure the promise of speed. If you go on our app and try and buy, you will still find a lot of products with same-day delivery. For me, what is more, important is that the customer has a great end-to-end experience. It is not about jumping on to the app, shop for two days and then the delivery will happen in 15 days. We never believe that. It does not work for a company which is obsessed with serving the customer. Our delivery continues to be exactly as per the plan. We are very happy with the deliveries which have happened. There are people in places like  Ladakh who have written to me saying ‘thank you for the delivery which happened on time.’ The reports that you are referring to are related to other marketplaces.

Amazon has expanded its partnership with Railways for deliveries in the festive season. Is there a preference for surface transport over air cargo?

The principle that we have is we always try and leverage the local infrastructure. One of our biggest channels for last-mile delivery is the ‘I Have Space’ initiative. Here about 28,000 stores do delivery. We started working with the Indian Railways, close to 2019. There has been five times growth in railway lanes. For example, Bengaluru to Mysuru can be described as a lane. Using our engagement with Indian Railways, we now have more than 325 intercity transportation lanes. Today you get faster delivery in a city like Ratnagiri or Kolhapur, because of the way we've connected, leveraging Indian Railways. Regarding Air Cargo, we use the most appropriate solution to take the goods to the customer in a sustainable way. Selection, value and convenience are our three pillars. So speed is a very important factor. When required, we would leverage both air and ground transport and we have a complex algorithm which works at it. Both air cargo and surface transport are a significant part of the firm.

Do you see Amazon cutting down spending amid an uncertain macroeconomic environment?

We are ahead of our plans and are very excited about the response we've seen from AGIF. Anything which helps us improve selection and enables our sellers to offer more value and give greater convenience to the sellers, especially our Prime customers, we would continue to invest in that. For this festive season alone we've done hiring close to 70,000 people for making sure customers have (better) experiences. We will continue to invest in the way we think is required to carry on our journey in this country and there is no change in that.