India’s leading e-commerce site, Amazon is expanding its delivery services to the Northeast region of the country with a total of 20 service partner nodes across the eight states in the region. Having already set up delivery networks in Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, the latest move see Amazon extend its footprint to the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram and Sikkim Nagaland.
Being among the tier 3 and tier 4 regions for distribution, these five states will now receive faster and timely deliveries with the latest service programme that features one of its ‘last mile’ delivery models and thus witnesses an increase to twice the service partner nodes that were previously available in the Northeast region. Amazon has also established a sorting centre for efficient distribution of orders to these service nodes in Gorchuk, on the outskirts of Guwahati.
Amazon has now set up 350 service partner nodes across India, the newest of them being Agartala (Tripura), Tamenglong/Ukhrul (Manipur), Saiha (Mizoram), Jorhat (Assam) and Zunhebotto (Nagaland). Amazon India’s “I Have Space” scheme partners with local outlets to deliver orders within a 5km radius and the company now has close to 17,500 stores under the program with each store delivering 20-30 items a day.
Speaking ahead of the announcement, Amazon India Customer Fulfilment VP, Akhil Saxena said “The Northeast is an important market for us. It is growing rapidly with smartphones in every hand and good Internet penetration. There are now 10,000 sellers in the region who sell through us. Amazon now has 20 Service Partner nodes across the eight North Eastern states. This is an almost 2X increase from the existing network of Service Partner nodes that were set up prior to Diwali last year.”