Amazon India expands ASPN with new services to help small sellers

In a bid to lure small sellers and boost up their sales, Amazon India has expanded the scope of Amazon Service Providers Network (ASPN) by increasing the number of services to 10 from the present three.

ASPN is a network of empanelled third-party service providers who help bridge seller capability gaps to enable millions of sellers in the country to take advantage of the fast-growing e-commerce industry. The services, which include imaging, advertising and logistics, have seen 450 providers listing their business on the services.amazon.in the platform to connect with sellers across 75 cities over the past 18 months.

Speaking to ET, Gopal Pillai, director and general manager of seller services at Amazon India said, “For us, 2016 has been a great year. Our seller base increased 160 percent to 1.5 lakh sellers on the platform. From helping sellers onboard through imaging and cataloguing, we have also added services to grow and manage the business.”

Among the new catalogue of services, there is one Sponsored Products Optimization (SPO) which is a pay-per-click model for advertising, on the lines of Google ad-words, which is open to all sellers.

Apparently, the ratio of brands to sellers using SPO presently is 1:2 where sellers want to optimise their spend for showing listed products among the top search results. Generally big brands team up with Amazon marketplace to promote their products with the help of brand page creation, banner ads and others as their spends on digital marketing are higher than the average seller.

While Amazon does help the service providers design their promotions during the festive and sale season to promote seller participation in the event, the services add to Amazon’s revenues nevertheless.