Amazon India launches advertisement services to boost revenue & seller loyalty

Etailers are pulling clever ad-targeting strategies from their sleeves to win the ecommerce war. Yesterday we discovered Flipkart and Snapdeal’s choice of weapon – Native Ads. Today it’s Amazon’s turn. Online marketplace Amazon India has launched advertising services with high mark-up to gain more revenue and build seller loyalty.

The exercise of starting this high-margin ad services was executed over the past three months on Amazon’s desktop as well as mobile platform. The ecommerce player’s self-service ad products enables sellers & brand owners to get their product ads featured prominently, buy search words for better search visibility and display ads. The charges can be on cost-per-click or cost-per-impression basis for a fee. And Amazon gets paid when shoppers see these ads.

Amit Agarwal, Amazon India’s Country Head said, “Hundreds of sellers are already advertising on Amazon.in and their number is growing each week. If you’re a seller you want to have the option of spending money on marketing and seeing the RoI (return on investment). Our Seller Central platform allows sellers to do this—How many clicks are they getting? Are they getting RoI? We have the same set of products for brands.”

He further added, “We have spent a lot of effort on building self-service ad products for sellers in a way that improves customer experience. A human (seller buying a self-service ads product) might be better at saying that if you like these kind of things, you may also like my product. So (the ad product) enables the customer to get exposed to more selection. It’s a more-power personalization system.”

With online competition getting tighter with each passing day, top etailers Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal are fighting tooth-and-nail to earn more revenues and market share. And monetization of ads presents a great opportunity to online marketplaces to cash-in their dominant position and cut down on their losses. Low cost, high margin along with the mammoth growth of the industry ensures attractive ad revenues.