E-commerce will play a key role in the Indian government’s vision of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (self-reliant India) as more homegrown brands scale up and go global, leveraging digital infrastructure, according to Amit Agarwal, global senior vice president and country head of Amazon India, who recently said e-commerce is at nascent stages in India.
E-commerce is hardly even 3 per cent of the country’s total retail consumption, he said.
“What I predict is you’re going to witness a kind of structural shift that propels us faster towards this vision of Digital India. I think Make in India is going to go global at massive scale, you’re going to have Indian brands become global brands and all of this is going to create a digitally robust business ecosystem across the country that is going to power millions of livelihoods,” he said.
Speaking at a TiEcon event, Agarwal said the Indian e-commerce market looked very different when the company had entered India seven years ago. The market at that time was mostly an urban phenomenon, people shopped on select events and it was not common to have people pay for shipping and convenience, he was quoted as saying by a news agency.
Also, the infrastructure was not sophisticated and the seller base did not have the skills to go online yet, he said.
He added that while competition exists, the company is more focussed on the right customer experience.
