Thoughts On Reuters’ Report on Amazon’s Indian Operations
India has been long known as one of the biggest potential ecommerce markets going forward. Reuters released a blockbuster report about Amazon's practices in India.
Here's what caught my eye.
Despite touting themselves as supporting small businesses, their primary plan was to make the "80/20" of the market a few large merchants.
What's more, they established joint ventures and then taught them to be sellers, and then helped these independent sellers scale - with help other sellers were not getting. More than anything, this allowed Amazon to figure out a way to essentially establish a "1P" program in India, even though it should not have been able to. Amazon's investment interests essentially became the first-party seller on its own site - the largest sellers by far.
Given the politics involved, I’m sure they knew this was a risk.
The entire "cat and mouse" generally, I am not too surprised by. Every tech company is in some way skirting rules. At Amazon's scale, however, this is not at the edges. This was the main driver of their Indian business - one where other large foreign companies were blocked from entering because they were not willing to go as far to find "workarounds" (that is the kind term) to the rules.
How does this differ from other retailers joining with local partners, sharing expertise, and infusing some capital? I see a few differences:
Amazon gets the public image boost as “supporting smaller sellers.”
Amazon employees helping specifically with Cloudtail scaling.
Amazon giving discounts and preferences to Cloudtail.
It’s not that Amazon is “creating sellers and helping those sellers to increase profits for itself” - these sellers were themselves, and they were given discounts and benefits others did not get.
Harsh Agarwal summed up some of these practices well here: “Amazon is flouting rules and favouring a few big sellers (in which they had stake) was always a known secret. They give priority listings and preference in search too for their "own" sellers like Cloudtail. The commissions charged to their own sellers was lower too. Amazon India was also involved in deep discounting tactics where they would buy a product for say 1000 INR and sell for 800 INR at a loss for years just to eliminate any competition.”
