Amazon India says its seller base has crossed the 20-lakh mark, with more than 3 lakh sellers signing up on Amazon.in — the marketplace’s fastest year-on-year seller growth in three years. The bigger story for marketers, though, is what those sellers are doing once they are onboarded: leaning heavily on AI tools for listings, inventory and advertising creative.
What Amazon is attributing the growth to
The company credits a mix of lower selling costs, AI-powered seller tooling, simpler advertising products and continued spend on fulfilment and delivery capacity ahead of the festive season. Earlier this year, Amazon rolled out zero referral fees across more than 12.5 crore products, cutting the cost of listing for small entrepreneurs.
Aruna Daryanani, Director, Selling Partner Services, Amazon India, said the goal is to make Amazon.in “the best place to sell for sellers of all sizes,” pointing to lower fees, AI tools that simplify daily operations and data-led insights for better decisions.
The AI adoption numbers worth noting
Amazon’s Seller Assistant — a 24×7 conversational AI helper available in English and Hinglish — is the standout. Users are doubling every six months and interactions have grown 7.5x year on year. The Hinglish support is a quiet but important detail: language accessibility, not feature depth, is often the real barrier to martech adoption among India’s small businesses.
Other data points Amazon shared:
- Over 2 lakh sellers use AI-powered listing tools to build catalogues and improve discoverability.
- More than 28,000 sellers use Product Opportunity Explorer to spot demand gaps using customer data.
- Over 69,000 sellers used Sale Event Planner this year to prep for peak shopping events.
- Sellers following AI-driven inventory recommendations saw 35% fewer stockouts; those acting on recommended deal prices saw a 2.5x sales spike.
- Sellers using Samriddhi, Amazon’s personalised growth recommendation engine, are 2.8x more likely to consistently beat their sales baseline across sale events, with those acting on its recommendations reporting a 174% rise in annual sales.
Advertising is where the shift is sharpest
The share of Amazon advertisers using AI-powered tools rose 77% year on year, and SMBs produced 62% more ad creatives using AI in Q1 2026 versus the year before. Amazon Ads is pushing self-serve options plus Creative Agent and Creative Studio, which let sellers generate professional-looking creatives, including video, at no extra cost.
There is an influencer angle too: the Amazon Ads Creator Program opens up a network of more than 5 lakh creators for sellers who want to test creator-led advertising without building relationships from scratch.
For agencies, this is the tension worth watching. When a retail media platform hands sellers free AI creative generation and a plug-and-play creator network, the low end of production and performance retainers gets squeezed. The defensible work moves upstream — brand positioning, portfolio strategy, category expansion and full-funnel measurement across marketplaces.
Ground-level and infrastructure push
Maharashtra alone accounts for over 2.2 lakh sellers and 57,000-plus local shops on Amazon.in. Amazon is running more than 20 Seller Connects and Ads Hive workshops across cities on catalogue optimisation, inventory planning, fulfilment and advertising.
On capacity, the company says it has created more than 1.6 lakh seasonal work opportunities across 400 cities, including Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets. Its network delivers to every pin code in India, with fulfilment centres across 17 states, sortation centres across 20 states, nearly 2,000 last-mile delivery stations, close to 28,000 Hub Delivery partners and thousands of Flex partners. Amazon has set a target of taking advanced technology capabilities to 15 million businesses by 2030.
What marketers should take away
Three practical reads. First, retail media in India is increasingly an AI-assisted, self-serve game — budget planning should assume more in-platform creative production, not less. Second, the metrics Amazon is highlighting (stockouts, deal pricing, baseline beats) show that commerce marketing performance is now as much an operations problem as a creative one. Third, if you advise D2C or SMB clients, the differentiator is no longer access to tools; it is knowing which recommendations to act on and which to ignore.
Source: MediaNews4U
