Amazon India, as part of its plans to go hyperlocal, will be tapping a huge number of kirana stores — around 9.3 lakh by 2025 — in metros, small cities and villages to make its last-mile delivery faster and seamless.

The e-commerce giant is adopting more vernacular languages, expanding ‘voice buy’ options in its app to break the technology barrier and continue its outreach expansion across uncharted geographies.

“From the current 75,000 kirana stores across 450 cities, we are going to increase it to around 10 lakh by 2025. We are raising speed and last-mile delivery by giving more options to buyers and sellers,” said Manish Tiwary, VP, Amazon India, after announcing The Great Indian Festival (GIF) 2021, which starts from October 4.

Giving an idea of Amazon India’s business jump amid Covid-19, Tiwary said that the company has added around 3,00,000 sellers to its kitty in the last 16 months — from 5,50,000 to of 8,50,000. “We currently have 85% customers in small cities, which was 60% just two years back.

Besides its ever-increasing product portfolio, the e-tail major is educating and enabling sellers and buyers, especially in smaller cities and towns, with an added focus on small medium businesses (SMB).

“We have around 58,000 Amazon Easy stores, where any new buyer can just walk in to be hand-held by trained shopkeepers. Newbies can have touch & feel product experience through a physical product buy-cum-delivery display. As many as nine local languages in the mobile app and an Alexa-based voice buy services in Hindi and English could be a game-changer for enabling more customers, especially in small towns,” Tiwary added.

The company has given a thrust on training its new sellers through online and offline training sessions, webinars and Seller University programmes. In July this year, it has launched its first Digital Kendra — brick and mortar resource centre — in Surat, Gujarat, to educate micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) on availing a range of third-party services such as shipping and logistics, cataloguing, digital marketing, GST and taxation support.

In 2020, Amazon had announced that it would invest $1 billion in India to help digitize 10 million MSMEs by 2025.