Amazon Retail India plans to enter 60 smaller cities

Amazon Retail India (ARIPL), currently present in more than 100 cities, plans to expand to another 60 tier 2-3 cities in the next 12-14 months. In 2017, the company received federal approval for investing $500 million in a venture to sell locally-produced food items. Multiple food distributors in various cities said currently Amazon is in the process of lining up dozens of small delivery centres, in the range of 2,000 sq ft, in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities for its hub-and-spoke supply chain model that will primarily be fed by large warehouses located in surrounding areas. ARIPL currently sells about 3,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) of food items and has lined up a network of 250 suppliers in various cities. ARIPL has had a tepid start locally. Amazon is the only large global corporation to invest in the country after India in 2016 allowed for the first-time overseas capital into selling locally packaged food items through both offline and online channels. Now that the government has allowed ARIPL to sell on Amazon. in, the venture is expanding. Amazon has even started creating separate warehouses for ARIPL that otherwise it used to share with Cloudtail and other Amazon operations.