Tête-à-tête with Gopal Pillai, the director, seller services, Amazon

Amazon India is the country’s largest online store, with more than 80 million products and 120,000 sellers. Amazon is also come up with a programme promoting female entrepreneurs by starting women owned delivery service wherein they promote weavers of India and artisans in textiles. People or cooperatives are trained to sell and promote their products online so that their reach becomes big and the sellers have a bigger audience for the make in India products and weaves, thereby reaching to global consumer.

Amazon has left behind its competitors including Snapdeal and Flipcart and fuelled e-commerce in India. According to the reports by Morgan Stanley, the online transactions are expected to reach $137 billions within 5 years. This has been achieved by Amazon despite the stringent rules imposed by the Govt. of India. Govt imposed strict FDI policy to protect the interest of domestic suppliers and industries, thus restricting foreign retailers from selling directly to Indian consumers. And then Amazon created a new business model and established its e-commerce in India and directly reached to local sellers. Then it recruited local suppliers and initiated into local market by establishing, for example, the award winning Amazon chai market. Here they started a fleet of three wheeler chai carts across 31 cities and navigated many miles serving over 37,000 cups of tea and signing up more than 10k sellers along the way. This unique way of establishing ubiquitous e-commerce all over the country and subsequently promoting the local sellers has brought Amazon a very long way. As Govindarajan wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “From product to delivery, Amazon has reinvented its ecosystem to address the challenges it has faced conducting an e-commerce enterprise in India.”

In conversation with Gopal Pillai, the Director and GM, Seller services, Amazon India. Gopal Pillai was here at ThinkBig 2016, organised by WeConnect international which was Asia’s biggest women entrepreneurs gathering. ThinkBig saw the women rise up and come like roaring waves for the summit. Women entrepreneurs came from all parts of the world and even from the tier 2 and tier three cities of India to be a part of this summit which served as an excellent platform for promoting women owned businesses.