Amazon ramping up Prime investments to outpace rivals in India’s quick commerce race

Nashville, Tennessee: E-commerce giant Amazon is ramping up investments in its subscription programme, Amazon Prime, to speed up deliveries as it faces mounting competition in India’s fast-growing quick commerce market. 

In India, Amazon offers its full-stack Prime programme for ₹1,499 annually, promising free shipping, quicker deliveries, and a suite of benefits, including Prime Video.

“We tend to spend a lot of our time obsessing about customers, not obsessing about competition, but we're definitely inspired by all the various alternatives our members in India have," Jamil Ghani, vice president, Worldwide Prime, said at the company’s Delivering the Future event held in Nashville on 9 October. 

"(T)he Prime proposition is built on the largest selection at the fastest speeds. We have over a million items available the same day; four million items available across India the next day…We're investing unprecedented amounts in making the programme even faster and we're going to continue to do that across the entire country,” Ghani said.

Amazon is channelling these investments into supply chains and physical infrastructure to improve delivery times, he added. 

Read this | Amazon boosts investment in speed for faster deliveries across multiple products

At the Nashville event, the company’s leadership unveiled a series of announcements related to delivery, shopping, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and sustainability, including the integration of AI-powered shopping tools into the Amazon app.

Amazon Prime, a paid subscription service, operates in 24 countries with over 200 million households worldwide. "India figures prominently in that landscape,” Ghani said though he did not disclose specific Prime membership figures for the country. 

His remarks come amid the rapid rise of quick commerce in India, where competitors like Flipkart and Zepto have been pushing the envelope with fast deliveries, forcing incumbents to accelerate their own operations.

Although Amazon hasn’t officially entered the quick commerce market, there is widespread speculation that the e-commerce giant has set its sights on the segment. Ghani hinted at the company’s direction, saying it is a "very natural” assumption that Amazon will offer faster deliveries on a wider selection of products.

“We're going to have more selection, we're going to go even faster, we're going to have other forms of convenience. We're going to add more to Prime video, music etc. The reality is that not only are there a lot of alternatives for our members, our members’ expectations also keep going up. We are going to be very busy for a long time just meeting those ever-increasing expectations of our Indian consumers,” the Amazon official said.

Ghani also suggested that Prime could look very different in the future, citing Amazon’s partnership with food-delivery platform Grubhub in the US, where Prime members now receive free Grubhub subscriptions. 

“Not only will we double down on the points of value today—across shopping and entertainment, but you will see Prime being of value and of service to more and more parts of all of our busy lives.”

Also read | Is quick commerce a sustainable business?

Competition is heating up in both online shopping and streaming in India. To keep pace, Amazon has introduced tiered Prime subscription services, with a basic membership starting at ₹399 per year. India is at the forefront of making Prime more accessible, Ghani said, noting the strong adoption of new pricing models aimed at attracting more Indian consumers.

(The writer was in Nashville at the invitation of Amazon.)