Amazon to expand same-day and faster deliveries in India, add more regional content

Amazon will continue its investment to expand its same-day, faster-than-same-day, and one-day deliveries in India as the e-commerce company seeks to optimise delivery speeds to even the remote areas ahead of the upcoming festive season. The expansion will include the fulfilment centre network, distribution, and delivery stations across the country, while a part of the investment will also go into adding regional content for customers and sellers on the platform.

“India is one of the top priority markets for Amazon and we have continuously been strengthening our extensive fulfilment centre network, distribution, and delivery stations across India to enhance our last mile capabilities. We will continue to invest in speed with the expansion of its 1-day, Same Day, and Faster Than Same Day network,” Abhinav Agarwal, Director and Head of Amazon Prime, India told Republic in an exclusive interaction.

Customer experience a priority

Agarwal said Amazon ’s customer experience strategies have four cornerstones, adding that cultural sensitivity, regional customisation, offering customisation, and data-driven insights allow the platform to tailor the experience for a diverse country like India. These four pillars also help Amazon increase the network for same-day and next-day deliveries. “Through such operational innovations to increase the same and next day deliveries, we’ve put products that our customers need and want as close as possible to them. This has helped us not only reduce delivery timelines but also minimise operational load, allowing us to pass on these savings to our valued customers,” he added.

At the helm of these strategies is artificial intelligence, which Agarwal said has been helping Amazon for over 25 years in different areas. “If you look at the personal recommendations you see in our e-commerce business that comes from AI, if you look at the paths that our associates use at our fulfilment centres to pick up items, those are based on AI algorithms,” he mentioned during the interaction.

Focus on regionalisation

Besides AI, the company has also been leveraging machine learning-based tools to power “our innovations in Voice, Video, and Regional content which in turn are critical to shape e-commerce and online shopping for the next 500 million customers.” Amazon is now planning to add more regional content on both customer and seller sides to improve product search and evaluation. While customers can currently shop on Amazon in eight languages, sellers “can now register and manage their business on Amazon in nine languages.”

AI and ML are also helping Amazon detect defects, such as title defects, or mismatches between product titles, descriptions, and images. While they are also instrumental in product demand forecasting, Amazon deploys its Deep Neural Network-based models to enable multi-quantile forecasts “over a wide range of time intervals.” Agarwal said that AI and ML also help in faster delivery of orders by validating customer addresses, computing address quality scores, labelling addresses, and fixing PIN code mismatches. Amazon will double down on its AI efforts to meet the demand during the upcoming festival sales.