Amazon India opens largest fulfilment centre in Sonipat

New Delhi: Amazon India on Thursday opened its largest fulfilment centre in Sonipat, Haryana, a warehouse sprawled across 200,000 sq. ft with a capacity of more than 800,000 cu. ft.

This is Amazon’s 22nd warehouse in the country. It has built up the largest warehousing capacity in the consumer Internet business in the country.

The fulfilment centre in Sonipat will help sellers in north India to stock their products with Amazon. “It will enable thousands of small and medium businesses to save money by replacing their upfront capital expense with low variable cost and pay only for the storage space they use and the orders that we fulfil,” said Akhil Saxena, vice-president, India customer fulfilment, Amazon India.

This is in line with Amazon’s planned investments in six new fulfilment centres in the country it announced earlier this month. The combined storage capacity available to sellers on Amazon.in will increase 1.5 times to 7.5 million cu. ft by the end of this year, the company said at a conference in Sonepat.

Amazon did not disclose the amount invested towards setting up the fulfilment centre.

In June, Amazon India got a $3 billion booster shot from its parent Amazon Inc. The firm has already exhausted its investment of $2 billion made in July 2014.

A fulfilment centre is essentially a large warehouse, where sellers dock products to help an e-commerce platform such as Amazon or Flipkart to pack, despatch and deliver products at faster and cheaper rates.

Amazon, which has fulfilment centres in 10 states, plans to open five more centres—one each in Coimbatore, Delhi, Jaipur and two in Chennai.

The Chennai warehouses are expected to be as big as the Sonipat one, said Saxena.

About 80% of Amazon sellers opt for fulfilment services by Amazon and over 1.3 million products are available for immediate shipping through fulfilment centres, the company said.

In June 2013, Amazon launched its e-commerce marketplace—Amazon Seller Services Pvt. Ltd—and since then has quickly ramped up its product selection to become the biggest rival to homegrown Flipkart Ltd and Snapdeal (Jasper Infotech Pvt. Ltd).

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.