Growth-hungry online retail giants look to tap the Northeast

Amazon has doubled down on faster deliveries in Assam, focusing on same-day and next-day deliveries, and added “a new fulfillment centre, a sortation centre, and 50-plus delivery stations”, said Saurabh Srivastava, vice president of Amazon India. Mint.

“These investments have enabled Amazon to deliver more than 2x more products (on an annual basis) to customers in Guwahati on the same and next day,” he added. The company’s marketplace has more than 10,000 sellers from Assam, reflecting the region’s deeper integration with the nationwide network.

Amazon rival Flipkart said the Northeast remains one of the fastest growing regions with annual growth of 35-40%, said Rajneesh Kumar, head of corporate affairs, Flipkart Group.

To meet the demand, the Walmart-owned company has built 6 lakh square feet of warehousing space supported by 391 delivery centers in Guwahati and Agartala; this is “very much in line with the size of warehouses in larger cities like NCR (National Capital Region of Delhi and surrounding areas including Gurgaon, Noida, Ghaziabad and Faridabad), Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Bengaluru and Hyderabad,” said Prashant Gupta, partner at Kearney, a management consultancy.

Flipkart’s new grocery fulfillment center in Agartala handles more than 5,000 orders daily across Tripura, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. More than 1 lakh sellers from Assam are active on the Flipkart marketplace, Kumar said.

Kumar added that Flipkart is also pushing forward its flash commerce arm Flipkart Minutes in the Northeast with nine micro fulfillment centers in Guwahati and they now offer “essentials, electronics, lifestyle products and regional selections”.

Flash commerce giant Blinkit entered Guwahati in January this year, opening a warehouse on Zoo Road and adding another warehouse in Chandmari. Swiggy remains active in food delivery in select cities in the Northeast, but its Instamart grocery service is yet to scale in the region and the company has not shared details about its infrastructure. Zepto, by contrast, has so far stayed out of the Northeast, confirming: Mint He said he did not operate there. Queries sent to Zomato via Blinkit and Swiggy received no response till press time.

Interest in online shopping is increasing

Consumer demand is also evolving, with increasing demand for premium segment categories such as fashion, beauty, watches and jewellery.

According to Redseer Strategy Consultants, India’s Northeast accounted for nearly 15% of the Indian e-commerce market in FY25.

Northeast sales in luxury TV segment priced above ₹Srivastava said that revenue of Rs 1 lakh has increased by 200%, while big screen TVs above 55 inches have increased by 100%, adding that premium smartphones have increased in price. ₹The volume of sales of 30,000 and above more than doubled, led by Samsung and Apple.

Change is not just limited to electronics. He said while sales of silver coins have increased sixfold, professional beauty products have increased threefold and demand for jewelery in Assam has increased by 20% compared to the previous year, traditional Assamese designs continue to be favourites. Flipkart points to a steady appetite in categories like fashion, footwear, beauty and home furnishings.

In terms of lifestyle and fashion, consumers in the Northeast show different preferences. First, they tend to demand smaller clothing sizes that reflect their petite body frames and were early adopters of the Korean cultural wave (K-dramas, K-fashion, and Korean skincare). As offline retail sales are limited to meet this demand, digitally savvy shoppers are turning to the internet.

According to the Kearney India report published in 2024, cities such as Imphal in Manipur, Agartala in Tripura, Shillong in Meghalaya and Silchar in Assam show high potential for e-commerce.

Browse unused areas

The penetration of online retail in the Northeast is currently 1.2 times higher than in the rest of India. The seller base is also diversifying: 60% of new sellers since 2021 are from tier 2 or smaller cities, according to Bain & Co.’s 2025 report.

“Most market leaders have saturated high-demand, easy-to-serve markets. The next wave of growth for market leaders or new entrants to the e-com (e-commerce) and q-com (quick commerce) industry will need to come from medium-to-low-demand regions or hard-to-reach regions,” said Kearney’s Gupta.

To achieve metro-level delivery speeds, players will need a two-phase approach, he said; They will first set up large warehouses and then set up micro fulfillment centers in neighboring states.

Exploring opportunities in the Northeast is part of major online retailers’ profitability plan.

Flipkart Internet, the marketplace arm of the Walmart-owned e-commerce giant, reported revenue of: ₹20,433 crore, up 14% in FY25 ₹17,855 crore a year ago, while losses narrowed by around 32%. ₹1,568 crore ₹2,296 crore, according to regulatory filings. The numbers show that Flipkart is focusing on profitability as it continues to grow revenues.

Amazon Seller Services, the marketplace arm of Amazon India, reported the following revenue: ₹30,138 crore, up 19% in FY25 ₹25,406 crore a year ago, losses narrowed by nearly 89% ₹374 crore ₹3,470 crore, according to regulatory filings. Mint had previously reported that the reduction in losses was largely due to higher contributions from market services and advertising.

Flipkart continues to lead India’s e-commerce market with an estimated 48% share by gross merchandise value (GMV) as of FY23, while Amazon comes in second with 30-35%.

Challenges at new frontiers

Historically, India’s Northeast has witnessed limited e-commerce investments due to challenges in connectivity and logistics, as well as sparse population making deliveries prohibitively expensive.

“Reverse logistics for returns is twice as costly outside Northeast cities. Purchasing power is also concentrated in major cities. The combination of all these factors has limited investments in major cities alone,” said Madhur Singhal, managing partner, consumer and internet, at Praxis Global Alliance, a management consulting firm.

The most important change is the perception of risk, Singhal said, adding that “companies are no longer hesitant to build infrastructure, hire talent and tap into the latent demand that exists there.”

But structural constraints explain why the region was difficult in the first place and why expansion still won’t be easy. “It is considered difficult due to the large and difficult terrain combined with low demand, causing costs to become higher and unsustainable,” Kearney’s Gupta said. Climate risks further increase costs.

“This situation is exacerbated by low population density, which means unit-level costs are much higher, sometimes even double that in cities. Road connectivity has improved significantly, but distances and density continue to strain the economy,” Singhal said.

Heavy rains and floods in Assam and neighboring states in early October, marked by weather forecasts and disaster warnings, led to traffic blockages and transport slowdowns in some areas in Guwahati and beyond. The platforms did not disclose the extent of order cancellations, but local media reports indicated that there were disruptions in last-mile supply chains.

“My clothes and skin care orders took more than 10 days instead of the promised three days and one of them was canceled completely,” said Mary Pamei, a 26-year-old resident of Imphal. He said shoppers in the area often order early for festivals to avoid disruptions, while cancellations are common during floods and deliveries are still unpredictable across the land.

“As a result, even as demand increases, fulfillment scale often lags behind,” said Kushal Bhatnagar, associate partner at Redseer Strategy.

E-commerce companies are trying to manage these restrictions by setting more realistic delivery timelines for remote pin codes.

“[Companies] Praxis’s Singhal said it is creating fulfillment centers and warehouses in areas that are relatively less prone to disruption and by partnering with local carriers and vehicle owners who understand the terrain well. “Climate risks of this nature also exist in other parts of the country such as Uttaranchal and Himachal.”