Amazon to deliver orders placed from rival platforms, plans to deliver food

Amazon seems to have big plans as far as logistics is concerned. The Jeff bezos-led company is expanding logistics service to its registered sellers, who are also selling on other e-commerce platforms.

Besides this, it also has plans to get into food delivery business and competes with likes of Zomato and Swiggy. The online marketplace is also reportedly eyeing to acquire Swiggy, according to the Economic Times report.

For its logistics service, Amazon already has started pilot with 300 merchants. Apart from offering logistics service for sellers on other marketplaces, it will also extend facility to sellers for offline movement of goods.

The move looks like the Seattle-based company’s game plan to control a larger pie of the Indian e-commerce sector.

“Amazon wants to build ATS into an independent logistic service which competes against Flipkart’s Ekart and other independent logistic services like Blue Dart and FedEx. It has started with its own sellers, but eventually will even look at offering logistic services to brands and other businesses. ATS has recently hired a lot of executives from leading courier companies,” said industry source to ET.

As per sources, the company has priced Amazon Transport Services (ATS) competitively to merchants, that is said lower than third-party courier services such as Fed Ex and Bluedart.

Recently, Amazon Transportation Services (ATS) in India received Rs 207 crore from Amazon Corporate Holding Singapore and Amazon Malaysia.

While experts see Amazon debut in logistics as a natural extension, its plan to foray into food delivery is quite interesting. “I think talk of Amazon getting into food delivery is not going to be anytime soon. However, it would be interesting to see whether it acquires any food delivery startup or go solo to build it from scratch,” said Satish Meena, Forecast Analyst, Forrester India.