“We are announcing a new online shopping service for consumers in India. It is an aggregation service that offers 1.2 crore products along with product information, reviews, pricing and shipping time details that help consumers to make purchase decisions,” Amazon.com Vice-President Amit Agarwal told PTI.
“We are excited to give customers in India a single online starting point where they can shop a wide selection of products sold by local and global retailers, and make informed purchasing decisions,” Amit said.
He added, “With the new service, consumers in India will find it easier to find what they are looking for. When a customer decides to make a purchase, he or she will be directed to either Amazon.com or to the website of a seller. The ultimate purchase will happen on the seller’s website.”
With Amazon in India, the employment opportunities will even be created. It’s been rumored that Amazon was to set up a facility in Hyderabad with over 3,000 employees.
However, interested buyers cannot buy directly from Junglee. Junglee.com is a mere link between buyers and sellers. The buyers would be directed to seller’s website, displaying their customer service phone numbers and providing their physical store locations to help you buy the products directly from sellers.
This extended arm of Amazon.com will compete against the smaller counter-parts such as Flipkart, InfiBeam and LetsBuy. Of late, Flipkart has been satisfying the needs of the users to the fullest. The customer satisfaction level is high.
Flipkart, like Amazon, started as an online bookseller. Interestingly, there is another link between the two companies. Flipkart, India’s biggest online bookseller, was founded by two former Amazon employees in 2007.
Talking about Junglee.com, the e-commerce website will offer more than 12 million products, ranging from over 14,000 Indian and global brands, as stated by Amazon. The collection would even include the retailer’s top-selling Kindle e-book reader. Indians would find products from Homeshop18, Hidesign, Gitanjali, Fabindia, Bata India, Dabur, Microsoft India Store, Reebok, Amazon.com. and many others.
Amazon might just strike gold with Junglee, as India is a country of more than 1.2 billion, where the middle class population are shifting to the upper middle class. Moreover, a decent number of buyers in India are now using the online mode to buy products. So the time is right for Amazon to strike.