Amazon Launches Smart Commerce To Turn Local Stores Into ‘Digital Dukaan’

The United States-based E-commerce major, Amazon on Wednesday announced the launch of its new initiative named ‘Smart Commerce’ which will enhance the digital footprints of local shopkeepers as they will be to set up their online storefront on the platforms. It will take the offline stores to online mode on the E-commerce giant’s India marketplace.

Launched at the third edition of Amazon’s flagship summit ‘Amazon Smbhav‘ The initiative is different from the previous initiatives of the E-commerce company that had been focused on listing the stores on the platform as sellers. Smart Commerce is aimed at transforming the stores into ‘Digital Dukaans’.

During the launch mentioning the success of the ‘Local Shops on Amazon’ program Amit Agarwal, Senior Vice President, India, and Emerging Markets, Amazon, claimed that over 1.5 lakhs stores have already been listed on the platform as sellers under the two years of the launch of the program.

Talking about the new initiative, where he termed the online storefronts as “Digital Dukaan”, he said, 

Today, we are excited to launch Smart Commerce that will enable any store to truly become a digital dukaan, and serve customers with the best of Amazon no matter where they are – in their physical store, directly through their own online storefront, or on Amazon.in. We are just getting started and remain committed to our pledge to digitize one crore small businesses by 2025.

Local shops on Amazon have already completed 2 years and according to the company, it has over 1.5 crore stores listed on its platform from all over India. The company has said that it will be releasing the first set of solutions in the upcoming weeks that will help the local stores in order to digitize billing and inventory management. As per the company, this will also include a support system and features which will let the stores create their online storefront in minutes further, enabling them to serve their customers with voice and chat-based shopping experience.

The company on its website smbhav.amazon.in mentions, 

Stores of any size can take advantage of the best of Amazon’s capabilities including logistics, digital payments, ads services and more to provide a reliable and trustworthy experience to their customers no matter where they are — in their physical store, directly through their own online storefront, or on Amazon.in.

Amazon India’s ‘Smbhav’ was launched in 2020 which is aimed at digitizing over 10 million small businesses in the country while enabling export of over $10 billion, and it also aims to create over 2 million jobs by the year 2025.