Top sellers on Amazon this season get to meet Jeff Bezos! More incentives in store

The lineup of sales and offers this festive season kickstarted last week with Flipkart’s Big Billion Days, Amazon’s Great Indian Festive Sale and Snapdeal’s Dil Ki Deals. While it was raining offers for customers, it was raining incentives for the sellers on these platforms, because offers cannot happen without the support of sellers right?

Trust the global ecommerce giant, Amazon to incentivize the sellers more. The rewards in store are:

• Trip to Seattle for the top three sellers. It would include meeting Jeff Bezos, visiting the Amazon fulfillment centres besides other perks.

• 15 other sellers will get to visit Amazon’s Indian headquarters, Bangalore, in addition to iPhone 6 Gold, LED Tvs, iPad airs, cashbacks of Rs 25,000 as gifts.

Competing for these rewards

Amazon is banking on its Diwali sale to pump up profits on its platform. This is the ecommerce player’s way of enticing sellers to work their best too through the campaign. Sellers would have to adhere to certain targets like:

• Fulfilling the first 100 orders without delays, complaints or returns

• Adequate stock of products so that the demand spike for the sale period can be fulfilled without hassles

Roping and retaining sellers

It is no secret that all the platforms are scouting for sellers this year to expand their product base and attract more customers. Amazon has close to a lakh sellers on its portal already, but incentives are a way of ensuring these stay while also getting new ones.

Gopal Pillai, Director - Seller Services, Amazon India told Business Line that, “Sellers are an important part of the ecosystem and the objective of this initiative is to recognize sellers who have contribution to keeping the bar of customer experience high by listing quality and relevant selection, maintaining the in-stock inventory levels, by fulfilling orders on times, etc.  In addition to the revenue growth through increased sales, sellers get an opportunity to earn rewards under an array of promotions. They also want to learn and grow their business. This festive season most of the sellers have done 8x kind of business. With new initiatives we expect that that they will do more than 10x during Diwali.”

Amazon steps up support for sellers

Like the others, Amazon also has been sprucing up on its backend to support the spike in sales during the offers period:

• Strengthened technology

• Added to warehouse capacity

• Seller app to notify sellers of fresh orders and stock changes

• Webinars to teach sellers about selling online (keeping in mind that a lot of the sellers come from smaller towns without sufficient knowledge of technology)

• Fast delivery for which Amazon has utilized existing warehouses of some sellers; these have been converted to mini fulfillment centres.