At its flagship annual Amazon Smbhav summit, Amazon India announced the launch of Smart Commerce, an initiative to transform local stores into digital dukaans, and accelerate its pledge to digitise one crore small businesses by 2025.

Over 1.5 lakh neighbourhood stores in India are already selling online using Amazon. With Smart Commerce, stores can now go further and digitise their offline operations, provide enhanced in-store shopping experience to their walk-in customers, and create their own online storefronts to serve customers directly.

Stores of any size can now take advantage of Amazon’s shopping innovations, logistics, digital payments and more to provide a reliable and trustworthy experience to their customers no matter where they are, in their physical store, directly through their own online storefront, or on Amazon.in.

In the coming weeks, Smart Commerce will release its first set of technologies to help local stores digitise billing and inventory management, and deliver an enhanced in-store experience to their customers. This will be followed by the launch of capabilities enabling them to create their own online storefront within minutes, and serve their customers through a simple voice and chat-based shopping experience.

“We are humbled by how neighbourhood stores from across India are taking advantage of our Local Shops on Amazon programme to go online and grow their business, with over 1.5 lakh stores already selling on Amazon.in within two years of launch,” said Amit Agarwal, senior vice president at Amazon. “Today, we are excited to launch Smart Commerce that will enable any store to truly become a digital dukaan, and serve customers with the best of Amazon no matter where they are, in their physical store, directly through their own online storefront, or on Amazon.in. We are just getting started and remain committed to our pledge to digitise one crore small businesses by 2025.”

At the inaugural Smbhav Summit in January 2020, Amazon pledged to digitise ten million MSMEs, generate $10bn in cumulative exports from India and create two million jobs in India by 2025. The company says it is on track to fulfil these pledges and even go beyond in some areas. Amazon recently doubled its exports pledge from $10bn to $20bn in the same time frame.

Manish Tiwary, country manager for Amazon’s India consumer business, said: “Over the last two years, we have invested significantly towards the pledges we announced at the inaugural Smbhav Summit in 2020. We are humbled to share that we have already digitised over four million small businesses and local stores, are on track to enable $5bn in cumulative exports and have created over 1.16 million direct and indirect jobs in India including 135,000 new jobs added in the last one year.”

Amazon Smbhav 2022 was a two-day virtual mega summit that brought together senior government officials, leaders from India, senior Amazon personnel and thought leaders for insightful discussions on accelerating India’s digital progress.