With the festive season ahead in India, retailing giant Amazon plans to add 10 more fulfillment centers in India. With this new addition, Amazon India’s warehousing capacity will spike to 32 million cubic feet with a 20% growth. The company is also planning to expand its seven existing buildings and believes this is its step towards establishing a long term commitment to invest in India.
Chosen Locations
Amazon plans to establish its new fulfillment centers in Lucknow, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Ludhiana, Delhi, Patna, and Ahmedabad. With these additions, the company will be able to flaunt 60 fulfillment centers all over India.
These new fulfillment centers would add thousands of new jobs in India, the company said in its announcement. It also assures that the pay for these jobs would be competitive, which is a piece of obvious great news for job seekers amidst this corona crashed job market season.
Enhancing Shopping Experience
This Covid-19 pandemic pushed shoppers to shed more focus on safety, which is visible in the boost in online shopping traffic. In the backdrop of the festive season ahead, market experts at the company believe that shoppers will prefer online shopping more than ever, and thus the decision is taken by the company.
The new fulfillment centers are all geared up to handle the needs of online shopping for large appliances and furniture, and hence are designed to handle large loads and will ensure customers with faster delivery on a wider selection of products and help ancillary businesses such as packaging, transportation, and logistics. The company plans to make these new fulfillment centers by the start of this festive season.
Growth in employment and economy
The trend for the addition of new fulfillment centers is typically followed by etailers to catch up with the raging Covid-19 driven online shopping trend. It was in May this year, that the company already gave a hint about anticipating demand for online sales and thus its plan to add more fulfillment capacity.
Commenting on this update, Amitabh Kant, CEO of Niti Aayog said that e-commerce will be a key driver of India’s growth and job creation, while physical procurement will give way to digital transactions.
Interestingly, there was a steep drop in sales during April and May where consumers restricted their online shopping to only essentials and masks. However, it is in July that the trend shifted and online sales found a boost.
Amazon is happy that with these new fulfillment centers the floor areas of Amazon India’s fulfillment network will be than 8 million square feet, which is more than the size of 100 football fields.
The e-commerce giant also introduced Receive centers, which are the product collection points, which distribute the products collected from sellers to reach the distribution network via Amazon FC network India.
This step by Amazon undoubtedly boosts the online shopping experience to more areas, improves the delivery speed and importantly provides new jobs, which is the most awaited good news ahead of this festive season in India.
