manish tiwary vp and country manager at amazon indiabengaluru the local arm of us ecommerce major amazon which completed nine years of operations in india will increase its focus on local stores and social commerce to tap into the next 500 million consumers in india manish tiwary country manager india consumer business at amazon india said in an interaction with etthere is a set of people that will require a local influencer to help them shop if you see the first part of the journey the metro penetration moved faster in the social commerce piece where an uncle or an aunt or a cousin living in your building actually helps you shop we feel very good about how we can scale it up he said advt tiwary was recently promoted to oversee all of amazon indias daytoday operations with amit agarwal now being given an additional emerging markets role along with india which et reported on march 1 the seattleheadquartered etailer said it was now looking to onboard more physical stores on its india platform to increase the number of goods that can be delivered quickly to customers tiwary said amazon could deliver within two days in 93 of the pin codes it is present in indiai strongly believe that to get to the next 500 million customers we need a couple of million more sellers on this marketplace and this set of new sellers will largely be physical stores he saidamazon india currently has 11 million sellers on its platform its total user base is more than 100 millionlast month amazon launched smart commerce an initiative that will help offline stores set up their own digital storefronts in addition to selling on its india marketplace this is similar to what canadabased shopify does amazon will enable these stores to sell on its marketplace and other platformsfor more and more people to shop with us our seller flywheel has to move if you look at the seller ecosystem there are manufacturers traders and then there is something which is very unique to india 13 million stores our philosophy on selection and convenience is making us double down on stores tiwary said adding that it had already onboarded 150000160000 stores on the platform advt amazons focus on social commerce is in line with its recent acquisition of glowroad which has introduced a zerocommission policy since then according to tiwary the emphasis on social commerce and physical stores was an outcome of the realisation that it would need different models to cater to a market like india it is also taking a bet on videos prime video minitv voice and influencerled commercein total the ecommerce firm has pumped in more than 65 billion in india and will continue to invest here across segments to grow its core commerce business like grocery in the grocery segment amazon is competing with many players to get mindspace from customers tiwary admitted that the company should have had a better grocery offering in place