BUSINESS
Indian customers love a good value deal and they prefer tailor-made plans for the services they use instead of relatively premium ones with a host of features. Abhinav Agarwal , director & head of Prime, Amazon India highlighted country-specific trends, challenges and the use of technology on the platform in a conversation with Geetika Srivastava . Edited excerpts: How was Prime Day 2024? What was its impact on smaller sellers? Amazon India celebrated its most successful Prime Day ever in 2024, setting new records for sales and Prime member engagement. We saw 24,196 orders being placed by Prime members in a single minute. About 24% more Prime members shopped this year versus Prime Day 2023. Spends on the Amazon Pay ICICI bank credit card were 50% higher than last year as well. Moreover, more than 65% of small and medium businesses that received a sale during Prime Day 2024 were from tier 2, 3 cities and beyond. We had 3,200 new products from small and medium-sized businesses this Prime Day. We had great deals across multiple categories, which included handmade and karigar-made products. We will continue to focus and ensure that the SMB ecosystem can thrive in India and Prime can play its part in that. Prime has been in India for eight years now. Have you noticed any unique trends, specifically those pertaining to tier 2 and 3 cities across the nation? We continue to see a high number of sign-ups from tier 2 and tier 3 cities. There is strong engagement. Last Prime Day, 50% of orders were from tier 2 and tier 3 cities. We see resonance across the board. Another consumer pattern we are seeing is that customers are starting to have multiple subscriptions — an OTT one, an e-commerce subscription, etc. They are really trying to rationalise how much value they are getting and if they need all of these. We worked backwards from this as well and launched a product called Value Communication. What this does is as a Prime member, you can find out how much you saved on Prime delivery, on Prime-exclusive deals, how much you saved through our co-branded card, how many hours of music you streamed and how many titles you watched. It gives customers a good view into the value they are deriving from the membership. What spurred the need for lighter plans for your customers? For the eight years that Prime has been in India, much like other geographies, we had one plan for Rs 1,499, which came with a host of benefits including shipping, shopping, video, music, reading and gaming. What we learnt from customers in India was that they wanted flexibility over which benefits they would like to use. They would say that they aren’t using a particular benefit of Prime, so why should they pay for it? Another thing we heard from our customers, on the video front, was that they didn’t really find the need for our regular plan, which gives ad-free video access to five devices. They would say that they didn’t have five devices — just a phone and a TV, and they were okay with watching ads too at a more affordable price point. So we worked backwards from the customer feedback and it led us down to invent and innovate. This is the first time at Amazon that we have multiple tiers of Prime — a Shopping Edition, Prime Lite, and our regular plan. None
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