Amazon, the global e-commerce giant is taking a slight detour from its aim of allowing users to shop on their smartphones. The brand is in works to bring in offline retail stores in the form of groceries with a slight twist.
According to reports by Economic Times, India will be the second country after the US to get brick and mortar stores by Amazon. The e-commerce giant has already got the approvals from government in India to start selling groceries and food products across the nation.
According to reports, Amazon is expecting to invest Rs 3,500 crore in the coming five years to sell groceries and other food products offline as well as online- taking advantage of the government’s FDI policies in FMCG sector.
According to a report by New York Times, the first grocery store is expected to hit the IT hub of India- Bengaluru, under the brand name Amazon Go.
The grocery store isn’t going to be like the conventional grocery stores. Dubbed as Project Everest, the stores will adopt automation and AI to prevent long queues at the cashier counter.
Moreover, the brand is looking for products other than groceries. In a recent report, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is also discovering the possibilities of selling home appliances, and furniture offline, something that people often refrain from ordering online, to give them a better perspective.
The brand is expected to adopt VR and AR technologies to make people figure out how a specific furniture or appliance would look in their home to give a more accurate idea.
India is a crucial market for Amazon. With the easement in FMCG sector in the nation last year, which now allows for 100 percent foreign direct investment or FDI, as long as the brand is selling locally sourced products.
It feels that Amazon definitely has a good chance of making it work, if everything falls into place perfectly, and gain the top spot in the groceries chain-store realm, just as it did with the e-commerce segment.
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