Amazon India is upbeat about its Launchpad program that was launched a year ago in India. It is a global program from Amazon that curates, showcases and delivers products from startups to scores of Amazon customers.
Amazon says that the program makes it easy for startups to launch faster, get noticed by Amazon customers and go international. Broadly, this program in India aims at offering its customers high technology from new age Indian inventors and startups. The company claims that ever since its launch in India the program has seen healthy growth in the number of applications. Interestingly Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore have emerged as the top cities in terms of the number of approved startup applications.
“As the pace of innovation continues to increase within the startup community in India, we want to help customers discover unique products from different innovative start ups and also learn about the men and the stories behind them. We feel that start ups find it very challenging to build a new product as well as market it. Our Launchpad gives our customers access to a variety of innovative new products from emerging brands. For startups, we handle stock management, order fulfillment, customer service etc allowing them to focus their efforts on the innovation to bring out new products,” Sateesh Srinivasan, Director and Global Head, Amazon Launchpad told THE WEEK.
Srinivasan further pointed out that start ups have different needs than established companies. “The Amazon Launchpad has been designed to meet the needs of such start ups while providing marketing benefits typically reserved for our more established Amazon sellers. We provide guidance and help create story-telling opportunities for startups to talk about their products using larger images, videos and custom product detail pages. Then we merchandise them across Amazon and on our Launchpad storefront to ensure that they are discovered by our customers. When a startup is ready to scale its business in marketplaces outside India, we help them leverage Amazon’s global presence so that they are able to expand at the global level too,” added Srinivasan.
Recently in collaboration with HAX (one of the world’s biggest hardware accelerator) and Kickstarter (a global crowd funding community) Amazon Launchpad kicked off Startup C-Cube, a multi-level challenge for Indian start-ups. The winning startup of the challenge will get support from the three organisations in its entire “concept-to-customer” journey and will also be provided resources for launch both in India and in Europe or the US, depending on the scalability of the idea. In addition to this, the winning startup will receive a set of benefits valued at $500,000 to support its product journey.
“Launchpad is currently present in nine Countries across the globe and besides India, we are supporting startups across the US, the UK, Germany, France, China, Mexico, Canada and Japan. All the products on the Launchpad platform are visible to our customers across these markets,” added Srinivasan.
