I've been a 11 year customer of Amazon US and a 2 year customer at Amazon.in. They certainly do get Indian culture. Amazon India isn't a bunch of white people from Seattle arriving en masse and setting up shop. They hired locally (including from Indian incumbents) and localized their operations to include stuff like COD, local language support etc. Amazon is well on its way to becoming as 'local' as McDonalds or Honda have already. Their capability to deliver in Tier II and III cities is already ahead of Flipkart for example. GMV is currently about 35% of Flipkart and I wouldn't be surprised if they overtook them in two years.
Last time I tried (guess it was last year), Amazon.in didn't have enough products I could buy. It was really looking like a family-run home business just went online (whereas flipkart was massive). Don't know if that's still the case.
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I've been a 11 year customer of Amazon US and a 2 year customer at Amazon.in. They certainly do get Indian culture. Amazon India isn't a bunch of white people from Seattle arriving en masse and setting up shop. They hired locally (including from Indian incumbents) and localized their operations to include stuff like COD, local language support etc. Amazon is well on its way to becoming as 'local' as McDonalds or Honda have already. Their capability to deliver in Tier II and III cities is already ahead of Flipkart for example. GMV is currently about 35% of Flipkart and I wouldn't be surprised if they overtook them in two years.
Last time I tried (guess it was last year), Amazon.in didn't have enough products I could buy. It was really looking like a family-run home business just went online (whereas flipkart was massive). Don't know if that's still the case.