Amazon India Launches 'STEP' To Accelerate Growth Of 700,000 Sellers It will simplify the seller experience by providing recommendations to help sellers improve key customer experience metrics and their growth

By Prabhjeet Bhatla

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Amazon India announced the launch of STEP, a performance-based benefits program designed to help sellers speed up their growth.

By improving performance, sellers can unlock benefits across multiple levels like Basic, Standard, Advanced, and Premium among many more. These benefits include fee waivers, faster disbursement cycles, priority seller support, and world-class free account management. STEP puts sellers in charge of their success on Amazon India by helping them track their performance, benefits, and growth in real-time through the STEP Dashboard on Seller Central.

Using customized and actionable recommendations, STEP enables sellers to improve key seller controllable metrics like cancellation rate, late dispatch rate, return rate, among others. Based on their performance, sellers can access benefits like online and offline training, fee waivers, faster disbursement cycles, and free account management.

"STEP empowers sellers of all sizes and tenure to drive their growth on Amazon.in by focusing on their performance on key metrics which matter to customers. STEP provides objective and transparent criteria along with benefits designed to help sellers improve their performance on these metrics in a predictable manner," remarked Amazon India vice-president Manish Tiwary, in a statement.

With the launch of STEP, the platform is introducing its revised fee structure, which was earlier deferred to after Diwali. The revised fees, effective from 1 December 2020, are linked to its levels and include a waiver on weight handling fees and lightning deal fees as part of its benefits. In addition to this, there will be a diminution in closing fee charges for products at low price ranging INR 250-500 and zero disposal fees for items shipped from Amazon fulfillment centers.

"At Amazon, we believe that focusing on long term customer experience matters. We have spent time obsessing over every detail of the STEP program and carefully crafting each element to ensure our valuable sellers can provide a great customer experience and in turn, grow and be successful on Amazon.in," Tiwary added.

The e-commerce platform has taken numerous initiatives this year some of which include free COVID-19 health insurance offered in partnership with Acko, on-demand payment disbursement, relaxation in performance metrics, fee waivers on inventory storage fees, and 50 per cent waiver on "Sell on Amazon' fees for small sellers and deferring its marketplace fee revisions to December 2020.

Prabhjeet Bhatla

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