We don’t intentionally call ourselves a super app: Amazon India’s Kishore Thota

In 2020 US e-commerce behemoth Amazon’s chief Jeff Bezos had announced $1 billion investment in world’s second largest Internet market -- India. This was in addition to $5.5 billion that the company had invested to scale its operations in India. Two years later, the e-commerce giant is betting big on free video service streaming and live-commerce channels to further attract the consumer base especially the users from beyond metros and Tier 1 towns.

 
This is above and beyond an array of services including e-commerce, investments, payments, food delivery, insurance, and ticket bookings lending that Amazon now provides in India.
 
Last week, homegrown salt-to-steel conglomerate, Tata Group launched its super app Tata Neu in India to capture the growing $55 billion e-tailing industry. But, Amazon India’s Director, Customer Experience and Marketing, Kishore Thota tells BT that the company does not want to be called a super app . Here is why. Edited excerpts.
 

BT: With a super app like Tata Neu already having been launched and stiff competition from homegrown companies now in the e-commerce space, how is Amazon taking the battle?
 
Kishore Thota (KT): The first thing I immediately want to respond to is we are very much a homegrown organisation. So, my team is in India, there are 1000s and 1000s of Indians working in Amazon and millions of jobs being created. So, I would contend that we are very much a homegrown company. The second part is [that] the competition is great, genuinely! It is great to have what we think slightly differently we don’t want to call ourselves a super app. We think about it as what [does our] customers need in their daily lives and how can we make them better? And how can we bring more and more use cases in a simpler fashion so that we can fulfil our customer needs and we work backwards from our customer needs, whatever paradigm it might be, whatever it could be called, looks and things may change but, at the core, we are focused on delivering all the daily needs that our customers have.
 
BT: What are currently the major focus areas where Amazon is investing to attract wider consumer base?
KT:  One of the things that we introduced recently, and is gaining a lot of traction is the miniTV service on Amazon, which is a subscription free video service. We are making a lot of investment there, it has been adopted really well.  So, it is something that is non-standard, in a way, what you expected is – you come for shopping, you come for consuming, but the miniTV service is one.
 
There are also content services like inspirational shopping,, a programme called Live Commerce which is a very nice way to just be inspired by various sets of influencers that talk about particular products. And we continue to experiment with live video - those are some of the things that are kind of catching up really well. We are kind of not so popular with talking about things that we have not launched yet. . So, I can’t really talk about the things that might be coming up. But these are some exciting areas.
 
BT: But didn’t Amazon have a dedicated a Prime Video service in India? How is Amazon miniTV different from already existent Prime Video?

KT: miniTV is a subscription service free service. There is no subscription needed, that lives directly on the Amazon shopping app. We believe that customers would just consume content wherever they might be. The selection is slightly different, and without requiring the Prime membership -- which offers collection of award-winning originals, latest movies in nine Indian languages. So, the contents [are] offered just freely and you will see it when you see the content in the starkness of the production or just the different dimensions we have taken to it. So, there are various segments of content within that industry. And this is what we have prioritised to bring onto Amazon.

[However], we don’t see these as completely different services. These are two different content types and this one is available to Amazon consumers for free. Prime Video is a subscription-based service that has originals as well as mainstream videos and movies. And in the future, it can do some of these. We would like it to be fairly seamless between different content types and different Amazon applications so that you seamlessly flow through each of these.
 
BT: Quoting Amazon India head Mr. Amit Aggarwal’s recent statement that Prime Video has been a major pull to attract customers to Prime membership. Would miniTV go beyond the subscription base to engage users?

KT: Yes, that is absolutely right! There are many ways to engage customers on the Amazon app, and not necessarily a shopping app. Customers can be offered more and more use cases, just like if you take the spectrum of things available on Amazon, right from playing games which has no transaction component to it. For more and more people these are all different use cases. And for us, as I said, [we want] to be part of our customers daily lives, and making that better. If you look at your daily life and map every single minute that we spend on certain things, most of these things are now available on Amazon.
 
BT: Talking about customer metrics, how has the engagement grown throughout Amazon’s journey in India?
 
KT: More than 100 million people use Amazon on a regular basis. Within that, the individual services that I was talking about --- the consumption needs, like payments and games, and all some of those, they are in several 10s of million multiples, which is also a large number in terms of depth of adoption. Similarly, we can think about individual categories within that business, how many people are buying more deeply into it? How many people buy from more than one category? How many people make payments, as well as those people doing one thing, to people doing many things, not just within shopping, but outside of shopping and including people that play games, make a payment and shop, those numbers are rapidly increasing. And it is a large double-digit growth in terms of how that composition continues to increase.
 
65 per cent of our customer orders are outside of Tier 2. And 86 per cent percent of our new customers in the last 2-3 years have been outside Tier 2 and plus. So, there is a rapid adoption, and we are multi-utility, multi-consumption use case app.
 
BT: Could you throw light at the hiring numbers considering operations are expanding at a massive scale?
KT: We continue to hire from universities as well as from open markets. What I can tell you though, during the toughest times back in 2020 when things were not so great and people were losing jobs, Amazon created jobs in the ecosystem – about 3 lakh direct and indirect jobs. So [it is] just an indication and I don’t have specific numbers to share.
 
BT: Is Amazon also preparing to launch its quick commerce delivery soon?

KT: I have a general viewpoint but not specific numbers. I see that this as an important for consumption need, [important] for our customers.  It is very much in line with what I discussed on becoming an integral part of our customers life – grocery is one of the most frequently interactive use case and the category - so it's a very important investment as well as a priority for Amazon. And we have lot of customer-facing improvements in terms of merging of our prior programmes together.
 
AmazonFresh is the customer facing programme. Older programmes have been deprecated. And now there is a lot simpler-to-use single grocery distribution system that we have created, thereby, really addressing some of the problems that we had before. So, grocery remains and is one of the most important verticals [for us].
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