(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. will begin testing a rapid delivery service in India this month, marking the company’s determination to compete with top players in the country’s fledgling quick-commerce business.
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The US e-commerce pioneer plans to experiment with the new initiative in some areas of Bangalore, the southern Indian tech hub, as a potential precursor to a broader rollout.
“Soon we would be piloting our 15-minute delivery service in Bangalore,” Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s senior vice president for emerging markets, told Bloomberg News at a company event in New Delhi Tuesday.
The product catalog on offer will vary from groceries to household items, depending on the neighborhood being served, Agarwal said.
“It can be so targeted,” he said, explaining that a neighborhood with a lot of readers may require a quick commerce product lineup that includes many books.
Firms including homegrown Zomato Ltd.’s Blinkit, smaller rival Swiggy Ltd. and conglomerate Tata Group’s BigBasket dominate India’s quick grocery delivery market, which rapidly expanded after coronavirus infections subsided. Walmart Inc.-controlled Indian online retailer Flipkart also entered the space this year with a service named Minutes.
India has developed a wide selection of grocery delivery services that take about 10 minutes, a breakneck pace compared with services around the world that typically clock in at days or a few hours. The trend is driven by a rise in consumerism in the south Asian country where an aspirational middle class is looking for speedy gratification.
Separately, Amazon will seek to achieve more than $80 billion in cumulative e-commerce exports from India by 2030, executives said at its annual event named ‘Smbhav,’ the Hindi word that means possible. Amazon will also earmark $120 million to help startups build their operations in India.
India is one of the fastest growing markets for Amazon’s e-commerce, cloud and video streaming businesses outside of its home region of the US. Still, its India push has been hamstrung by local regulations and antitrust challenges. The country’s trade minister has especially been vocal in calling out Amazon for flouting local rules and undercutting mom-and-pop stores, charges that the company has strongly denied.
