Samir Kumar’s return to Amazon India is a full-circle moment. Having helped set up the Amazon Development Centre in 2004 and played a key role in launching Amazon India operations in 2013, he’s now back for his “second innings” as country manager. One of the key focus areas for Kumar is how to bring India’s fragmented, informal retail base online, and how to equip that seller base to go global.

Without changing the DNA of who’s doing the selling, Amazon is looking at helping millions of small merchants, artisans, and traders—not just onboard onto Amazon, but succeed in a digital-first, customer-expectation-driven world.

Without delving into the regulatory scrutiny that the online platform is facing in India, Kumar tells Fortune India: “We take pride of being able to helping the smallest possible seller and making them successful. Making it easy for them to sell, using our AI, and having a democratic platform where they can have the confidence that they can build a business on that.”

Digital-first strategy

Amazon’s retail transformation playbook is built on eliminating friction for small sellers. That starts with listing. Kumar admits that even something as basic as creating a product page can be a barrier for a first-time online merchant. That’s where Amazon has begun deploying AI to radically simplify onboarding.

“Some of the smaller sellers—we have to help them out from listing their product, making it easy. Take a picture of the product and create a listing out of that. Now, with some of the AI tools that we have, we have just announced that and it’s getting good traction,” says Kumar.

Without clean, accessible listings, no seller—no matter how good their product—is visible to the end consumer. That visibility is the start of formalisation for Amazon, which has also deployed generative AI to clean up product catalogues and help sellers align with existing listings instead of creating fragmented duplicates—critical for discoverability, pricing parity, and operational efficiency.

“We are using GenAI to clean that up so the sellers can list their product easily based on the catalogue that we have already built. We are investing in a lot of innovation and invention for our selling partner,” says Kumar.

As of December 2024, Amazon India has digitised over 12 million micro, small, and medium enterprises, surpassing its initial goal of 10 million by 2025. This figure encompasses a diverse range of participants, including sellers, artisans, weavers, start-ups, and logistics partners. Specifically, more than 1.6 million sellers are actively offering products on the platform.

Net zero with a difference

But onboarding alone won’t bring India’s millions of unorganised sellers into digital commerce. Affordability matters. Especially for low-ticket, high-volume goods that dominate Indian consumption patterns—from a ₹25 detergent sachet to a ₹99 kitchen item. Many of these weren’t making it onto Amazon simply because it didn’t make commercial sense for the seller.

“Our customers were saying, ‘Hey, why are you not carrying this? Why are you making me buy this large pack of Surf Excel? Why can't I buy a smaller pack?’ Our sellers were saying, ‘Hey, I cannot sell it. I would love to bring this product into your warehouse, but your fees are too high,’” reveals Kumar.

In response, Amazon rolled out a zero-fee policy for low-value products—a move that was both economic and strategic. By removing fee-related friction, Amazon enabled both wider product availability and better value access for consumers in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns.

“We were lacking selection for our customers and we were lacking enough incentive for our sellers to be able to build that business in a sustainable fashion. We listened to both of them. That is the primary motivation,” says Kumar.

A Glocal marketplace

But the most far-reaching piece of Amazon’s formalisation strategy may not even be domestic. It’s the company’s ambition to turn Indian MSMEs into global sellers.

“In December [2024], we announced $13 billion in exports. We want to take that number to $80 billion in the next five years,” says Kumar.

Though the numbers are ambitious, Amazon is not banking on a few large exporters; it’s trying to scale small sellers with global potential. That includes listing support, cross-border compliance tools, fulfilment integration, and export-readiness advisory.

“We get there by enabling sellers to be able to list easily, not just in India, but across the globe. Once they're listed, being able to ship those products to our warehouses globally. And we are providing them tools and best practice, also helping them with some of the compliance requirement, ensuring that they can export the product in a compliant fashion,” says Kumar.

Amazon’s flagship e-commerce exports program, Amazon Global Selling was launched in 2015. In the past nine years, 1.50 lakh exporters have been part of this program, cumulatively selling over 40 crore ‘Made in India’ products to customers across the world. The total seller base on the program has grown around 20% in the past year. It enables sellers to build global brands by selling to hundreds of millions of customers on 18+ Amazon global marketplaces across the US, the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, and the EU.

As Amazon looks ahead to its next chapter in India amid increased regulatory scrutiny, it is looking to build on its seller-first strategy as a strong moat. “There’s a lot to be done than we have already done. Like, we need to create the next boAt and the next Mamaearth of India,” says Kumar.

Call it a goal or a strategy, Amazon clearly wants to be the platform where India’s next generation of consumer brands are born, scaled—and exported.