Foreign companies expand their markets by launching products in multi-nations but they face different problems in different countries. Indian users have always been a challenge to most of the popular international companies because consumers in India have a unique way of using every product and service.
According to Akshay Sahi, Head of Amazon Prime in India, Amazon Prime has faced many new challenges in India that it hadn’t faced anywhere else in the world. Amazon Prime was launched in 2005 in the US and the company expanded its market by making it available for the people in Germany, Japan, UK, Canada, France, Italy, and Mexico. Amazon Prime was launched in India in July 2016 and since then Amazon is discovering many bugs that their product had.
“There are loopholes which have existing up in signing up for Prime membership globally. Nobody even understood those loopholes until we launched in India,” Akshay said in an interview.
Amazon Prime is priced at Rs. 499 a year for free shipping and two-day delivery, which the company feels is very reasonable according to the services. But Indian users are trying to get this membership for free. Also, they are not afraid of sharing their tricks with other users.
YouTube is full of videos that have tricks about how to use Amazon Prime without paying anything. Most of these videos are made by Indian YouTubers in different Indian languages. They are showing methods such as entering a fake delivery address and setting the payment method as cash on delivery. Another method that became popular was simply moving to the payment page and shutting that tab which will sign up for the Prime membership.
Because of these videos, Amazon India got a lot of new sign-ups and the company was confused about which one is fair and which isn’t. To solve this Amazon India had to detect all the methods and analyze quickly to remove all the bugs without causing any harm to their genuine customers.
“We don’t know whether to be embarrassed or proud. In India, when you have a loophole, someone will drive a truck through it,” says Sahi.
