Amazon joins the price war by selling products for $7

According to foreign media reports, people familiar with the matter revealed that Amazon is planning to build a new vertical e-commerce website in India - Amazon Bazaar.

The site is said to offer low-priced, unbranded fashion and lifestyle products to "value consumers" with low prices, including clothing, watches, shoes, jewelry and luggage, all priced below 600 rupees (about $7.23 at today's exchange rate).

The "value consumers" mentioned here refer to those consumers who pay more attention to cost-effectiveness, pursue affordability and discounts when purchasing goods. It is reported that these consumers usually prefer to look for reasonably priced and high-quality goods rather than high-end brands or luxury goods.

Amazon Bazaar has started recruiting sellers , according to sources . However, unlike the fast delivery provided to Prime members, the delivery speed of this low-price platform is two to three days. It is worth mentioning that Amazon intends to adopt a petty cash model on this platform, which is crucial for products with lower average prices.

With Amazon's move, the "melee" among major e-commerce platforms here seems to be heating up.

A report released last month by research firm Bernstein showed that Amazon India 's user growth rate will be only 13% in December 2023. But its rivals Flipkart and Meesho's user growth rates in the same period were 21% and 32%, respectively.

A few weeks ago, Flipkart received an initial $600 million investment from its parent company Walmart. Last week, Amazon's Indian branch announced that it had received 830 million rupees (about $100 million) in funding from its US parent company. Obviously, both companies hope to capture the potential market in India.

However, Amazon is still slightly behind Walmart in terms of developing the market of "value consumers". The revenue of Shopsy platform launched by Flipkart exceeded US$7.7 billion in fiscal year 2022. In February 2023, Flipkart announced that Shopsy accounted for 40% of its new customers.

In addition, one of Meesho's features is low prices, as the platform also adopts a model of exempting sellers from commissions. Meesho said in a blog last month that the platform's operating revenue grew 77% to 57.35 billion rupees (about US$6.91 billion) in the last fiscal year.

There are also reports that India's own large multinational company Reliance Industries is also working on developing a low-cost platform Ajio Street .

In addition to competition from peers, the Indian market itself also has issues that need attention, such as the return rate. In mid-last month, survey data released by Statista showed that between October 2022 and September 2023, India was the market with the highest online shopping return rate in the world, with a return rate of up to 80%.

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Low-cost platform