Amazon, other players pare down B2B grocery business

The business of shifting app-ordered grocery stocks and consumer products to Indian retailers, especially kiranas, turned into a gold rush in 2018-19. Amazon and Reliance Industries became the latest to enter a crowded field, where venture-backed companies, including newly minted unicorns then Udaan and BigBasket, were already hard at work. 

Over the past four years, though, a number of players have found more dirt than glittering gains, and that struggle is taking a toll.

Amazon Distribution, the tech giant’s dedicated platform for B2B ecommerce, is scaling back operations by shuttering one of its few warehouses, people aware of the development told The CapTable. The affected facility is in Karnataka’s Hubballi city, about 415 km from Bengaluru.

To be sure, the platform started out by covering just three cities, all in Karnataka, selling goods from soaps to multiplugs to shops. (A relatively minor play in the parent organisation’s overall India business.) It added two more locations in the state, but did not manage to expand in a major way to other corners of the country.