\\"Before Prime Day, Amazon increases the space for delivery service in 2 hours"
With up to 67 fulfillment centers (FCs) in 13 Indian states and a storage capacity of more than 20 million cubic feet, Amazon India says it now has the largest storage capacity among any e-commerce company in the country.
Apart from that, the company has created a whole new wing of advanced logistics providers, which are basically small-format warehouses within a city for urgent two-hour deliveries. Amazon now has 17,500 such “I have room” stores in 225 cities and 350 service partners in 320 cities.
Reinforced back-end logistics will help the company when it launches its 36-hour global sale exclusively for its ‘Prime’ members on July 16.
Prime Day is Amazon’s global flagship event created for more than 100 million Prime members in 17 countries, including India. This year, Amazon has added countries like the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Australia and Singapore to the list of places where it will take place.
“Prime members in India can enjoy more than 200 exclusive product launches, thousands of deals at the lowest prices of the year, and blockbuster entertainment launches on Prime Video and Amazon PrimeMusic,” said Amit Agarwal, Senior Vice President and Managing Director. from Amazon country India. The company has a total of 340,000 vendors across the country.
According to industry insiders, Amazon India could, by the end of this year, occupy more than 30 million square feet of real estate in the country. Its biggest rival, Flipkart, according to sources, has around 41 stores. Officially, the company has not disclosed the number of warehouses it has in India.
Amazon follows a mixed real estate ownership model that includes both lease and purchase space. Experts believe that Amazon could soon be on par with some of India’s biggest software companies in terms of real estate acquisition.
Some time ago, the American retail giant opened small-format warehouses in Indian cities to launch faster deliveries. On Prime Day, the company will launch a two-hour express delivery service at the back of ‘I Have Space’ stores.
“This program handles a significant proportion of our large logistics volumes in the small towns and metropolitan cities of India,” the company said. Under the program, local store owners must deliver products within a two- to four-kilometer radius of their stores, which also double as pickup points for customers residing in the neighborhood. On average, partner stores deliver around 30 packages a day, while earning a fixed amount per delivery in return.
Experts believe that the next phase of expansion would be taking up space for new data centers. In 2016, Amazon launched its first set of Indian data centers in Mumbai to serve cloud computing services.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to take more space to set up data centers. Currently, it has more than 80,000 companies using the AWS Cloud. Amazon, with about 50,000 employees in India, is also rapidly expanding its office space.
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