Amazon beats Flipkart in seller base; all eyes on festive season now

Amazon India added 20,000 new sellers in last six weeks and tripled its seller base this year to whopping 1, 20,000. With these seller base numbers, Amazon India has raced past Flipkart, which has 95,000 sellers on board.

Amazon India’s aggressive and lenient strategy to add sellers on its platform is going to help the online marketplace in the upcoming festive season.

To have more sellers, Amazon India started Amazon Tatkal services through which merchants were added in an hour. Not only this, Amazon India also lowered commissions it charges merchants for selling on its marketplace in June, at a time when Flipkart raised its commission and tweaked its policies.

"We have 120,000 sellers on the platform now, of which 20,000 sellers came in the last 5-6 weeks," Gopal Pillai, general manager of seller services at Amazon India, told ET. That's an increase from about 45,000 merchants at the end of 2015. Amazon also has 16,000 sellers who are part of its global programme, with some overlap between Amazon.in and Amazon.com.

Under Amazon Tatkal, the executives travelling travelled across 50 cities in studios-on-wheels that allowed sellers to sign up instantly.

"Amazon Tatkal created huge awareness through word-of-mouth. What helped was that many sellers coming on board through this progamme are getting sales from the very next day," said Pillai.

Amazon India has also launched Seller Cafe programme in 24 cities to onboard more sellers and resolve their issues.

"They let us contact customers directly and let us decide the refund amount in case of returns. The option for self-shipping is also helpful when we need to send orders to remote locations," a spokesman for the All India Online Vendors' Association, a grouping of about 1,000 online sellers, told ET.

For other sellers, however, Flipkart is still the preferred platform. "Almost 70% of our sellers give first priority to selling on Flipkart, mainly because it still sees the highest traffic and it has the most seamless payment integrity," Sanjay Thakur, spokesman for ESellerSuraksha, a group of about 1,700 online sellers, told ET.

Flipkart has shifted its policy on improving the quality of its top 100 merchants. Snapdeal, third behind Amazon India in terms of sales, has more than 300,000 sellers.

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