mumbai ecommerce major amazon is taking your neighbourhood kirana store online the etailer is launching an express delivery platform in partnership with momandpop stores calling it kirana now starting first in bengaluru on a pilot run amazon intends to scale this up nationally a senior executive from the seattleheadquartered company said talking exclusively to toi amazon indias country head amit agarwal said kirana now is an indiaspecific innovation built particularly for the local market this is a byindia forindia service we want to provide maximum convenience to customers when shopping for their everyday needs and enable them to shop from the ecosystem of their local stores on their mobile phones and get things delivered when they really need it agarwal said grocery etailing has till now been confined largely to vertical players like big basket with the bigger horizontal etailers focusing more on electronics and apparel hyper local delivery apps like grofers modelled on the likes of instacart and postmates have also tied up with grocery stores to facilitate their deliveries for now amazon which operates on the marketplace model connecting merchants to buyers has introduced this service only on the mobile platform and will deliver orders within twofour hours these corner stores which would be listed as sellers will upload their catalogues online on our platform and we would help with the backend and technology agarwal said the deliveries would be taken care of by amazon the kiranas and thirdparty logistics last year amazon had started using kiranas as pickup and delivery points an indigenous improvisation on amazon lockers which the company operates in the us and some other markets the online commerce behemoth which competes aggressively with homegrown etailers flipkart and snapdeal extended the pilot that had kicked off last year to as many as 500 stores across 28 cities arvind singhal chairman at retail consulting firm technopak said the food and grocery retail business is about 370 billion out of about the overall 530billion retail merchandise spending that was done in 201415 major horizontal ecommerce players chasing gross merchandise values gmvs in doubledigit billions of dollars have no option but to enter the fb segment in order to achieve these goals in the us the ecommerce giant has been operating amazonfresh an online grocery delivery service since 2007 it offers home delivery of products on the same day or the next day and competes with google express and one of the hottest san franciscobased startups instacart by samidha sharma tnn published on mar 26 2015 at 0828 am ist telegram facebook copy link be the first one to comment comment now comments comment now read comment 1 all comments post post find this comment offensive choose your reason below and click on the submit button this will alert our moderators to take actions reasons for reporting foul language defamatory inciting hatred against a certain community out of context spam others report join the community of 2m industry professionals subscribe to our newsletter to