Amazon setting up six fulfillment centres across India

Bengaluru, July 7 : Leading e-commerce player Amazon India on Thursday announced expanding its infrastructure by adding six more Fulfilment Centres (FCs) to better equip itself for the upcoming festive season.

"With the exponential growth of online shopping in India, we are glad to announce six new FCs in India. We remain committed to investing in our fulfilment and logistics capability to enable and empower sellers to serve customers nationally at lower costs," said Amazon India Vice President Anil Saxena in a statement.

Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai are among the new locations of the planned centres, but Amazon did not divulge the investment value. It already has 10 such centres in Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and West Bengal.

A FC enables a small seller or an SME to reach out to prospective customers on a massive scale by utilising the well-established infrastructure of an etailer like Amazon. Sellers can send their products to Amazon's FC, from where the etailer picks, packs and ships the product to the customer who placed the order.

FCs thus empower offline sellers by enabling saving costs and replacing their capital expenditure while the sellers pay Amazon for the storage space and the orders fulfilled.

With the addition of the new FCs, Amazon will have operational FCs with a storage area close to 2.5 million square feet.

"Fulfilment Centres fulfil important needs of small and medium enterprises seeking markets and customers located all over India and lacking resources to create their captive distribution networks," added Saxena.

Launching its operations in India in June 2013, Amazon.in currently etails 1.3 million products.