Building Fastest Growing Marketplace in India Amazon India has earned the sobriquet of 'Apni Dukan' with 100+ million customers. What's more, it allows one to shop in 7 languages, and has made inroads into smaller towns as well. During the festive season, close to 70% of its sales come from smaller towns

By Paromita Gupta

You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Manish Tiwary, Country Manager, Amazon India

In 2013, when Amazon entered the e-commerce space in India, it was in stiff competition with Flipkart and Snapdeal. Cut to 2023, it has not only surpassed the two online marketplaces, but has also earned the sobriquet of 'Apni Dukan' with 100+ million customers. What's more, it allows one to shop in 7 languages, and has made inroads into smaller towns as well.

During the festive season, close to 70% of its sales come from smaller towns. "We have continued to invest in customer experience and infrastructure and are continuing to work on improving the experience for new customers," says Manish Tiwary, Country Manager, Amazon India on the sidelines of Amazon Smbhav 2023, marking 10 years of the tech giant in India.

Besides the customer base, there has been an increase in the seller base too. "We have close to 12 lakh sellers with us now and we are making use of technology in some ways to give each of them a personal assistant. Our Sahay support for sellers is one such initiative," says Tiwary, who spent two decades at consumer goods giant Unilever, and headed sales at HUL before being promoted to the role of managing director, Gulf region for Unilever and then Amazon.

Tiwary shares that last year the company invested in GlowRoad, which does social ecommerce. "We took it over in the middle of last year. Month on month we are growing 15%. India is a diverse country. One size doesn't fit all. We are continuing to work on improving the experience for new customers," adds Tiwary.

In its latest initiative, the company has also forayed into grocery offering. "If one wants to engage with customers, one needs to have grocery offerings and fashion offerings. Lots of companies are doing good work. Our Amazon Fresh is now available in 14 cities. It's a challenging cateroy for our sellers, because the business model has to be really good and they are working on it," shares Tiwary.

Paromita Gupta

Entrepreneur Staff

Features Writer with Entrepreneur India

Covering news and trends in AI and Metaverse segments. An avid book reader running her personal blog on the side. You may reach me at paromita@entrepreneurindia.com. 
Business Ideas

70 Small Business Ideas to Start in 2025

We put together a list of the best, most profitable small business ideas for entrepreneurs to pursue in 2025.

Business News

Elon Musk's xAI Claims Its New Grok 3 AI Is Better Than ChatGPT and DeepSeek: 'Seeing the Beginnings of Creativity'

xAI debuted the new AI on Monday, claiming it has 10 times the computational power of Grok 2.

Business Solutions

Get a Lifetime of Powerful PDF Tools That Won't Give You a PDF Headache

Banish frustrating PDF issues forever and just breeze through all of the old problems with editing, formatting, converting, annotating and more.

News and Trends

5 Things to Know About Zomato's Nugget AI

With the Indian conversational AI market projected to grow from USD 274.5 million in 2022 to USD 1.03 billion by 2029 at a CAGR of 24.58%, Zomato's entry into this space aligns with broader industry trends

Business Ideas

87 Service Business Ideas to Start Today

Get started in this growing industry, with options that range from IT consulting to childcare.

News and Trends

Gen Z Leveraging Fintech to Fuel Aspirations, 2025 to Have Increased Demand for Capital: Report

Borrowing patterns last year are also poised to influence habits in 2025, with Gen Z increasingly using lending solutions such as mPokket, Slice, and the like.