Amazon India opens first facilitation centre in Punjab

Ruchika M. Khanna

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 16

The world’s top e-retailer, Amazon India, is offering more space to handicraft manufacturers and other small and medium businesses in Punjab for reaching out to a much larger consumer base. As part of this expansion, the company today opened its fulfilment centre at Doraha, near Ludhiana.

This is the 12th fulfilment centre of Amazon in the country, and the first to be set up in Punjab. The company has leased the space for setting up this Centre, which will cater not just to sellers, but also to buyers in the region, who can now get faster delivery of products. The new centre is spread over an area of 5,000 sq ft and is a secure and automated pick, pack and ship processes centre to facilitate the safe and timely processing of merchant orders.

Talking to The Tribune here today, Akhil Saxena, Director, Operations, Amazon India, said with the opening of this centre, they have centres spread over 10 lakh sq ft area in nine states. “We now have 26 lakh cubic feet of storage available for our clients. In Punjab, we have had a good customer base – especially with hosiery industry in Ludhiana, sports goods industry in Jalandhar, phulkari retailers in Patiala and inlay work furniture from Hoshiarpur. Their goods have a huge market and in order to ensure timely delivery, we have decided to set up the facilitation centre in the state,” he said.

He said this investment was a part of Amazon’s focus on enhancing online shopping experience for consumers in India and enabling Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to get a national platform. The launch of the new centre in Doraha is part of continued investment in providing fast and reliable delivery across vast selection of products, and enabling sellers of all sizes to achieve nationwide scale, he added.

“Over 150 sellers from across the state have already registered at the facility and many of them have started inbounding their products at the facility. In the past two years, Amazon has invested substantially in creating logistics infrastructure throughout the country. With the new centre in Punjab, we hope the local manufacturers will get a big boost as a never-seen-before market opens up for them,” he said.