Finally, Amazon India has started its operations in the country with Junglee.com, which was acquired by Amazon in 1998 from Indian entrepreneurs Rakesh Mathur & Ashish Gupta for around $230 million; it was a database product with two applications at the front end – a job aggregator & a comparison shopping engine.

Junglee is an online shopping service started by Amazon which enables customers to find, discover and read reviews about products from online & offline retailers in India & from Amazon.com. Existing Amazon users can login using their Amazon credentials. Users can then review products & even ‘Like’ products as well as sellers. The platform, which is still in beta, offers more than 1.2 crore products from over 14,000 brands & hundreds of retailers. Amazon lists Homeshop18, Gitanjali, Fabindia, Dabur Uveda, UniverCell, Hidesign, Microsoft India Store, Reebok, Amazon.com,etc. Users cannot directly buy anything from Junglee.com as FDI in India has not been allowed for multi – brand retail operations.

For the time being, sellers can list their products free of cost. But in the future, Amazon may charge 2-20% depending on the product.

Also Read: Flipkart Raises $150mn at a Valuation of $850mn