(This story originally appeared in on Mar 31, 2015)

NEW DELHI: Amazon is shipping abroad a model that it has perfected in India. Easy Ship, a pick-up and delivery model that the world's largest online retailer employs in India, will be tried in the company's home market, the US, as well in the UK and China, but with some local adaptations to suit the requirements there. Easy Ship is designed for India's legions of smaller sellers.

It ensures that the vendors don't require to stock products in Amazon's warehouses; instead, Amazon's delivery person will pick up the product from the seller's doorstep when a consumer order comes in. With this model, Amazon has been able to significantly scale up in India, its country head said.

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"It is India learning ," Amit Agarwal said. "Its incarnation as you see started in India and we have taken the same learning to other countries like China, taken it to the US and taken it to the UK."

India doesn't allow foreign investment in companies that sell online directly to consumers. E-commerce companies including Amazon and foreign-funded local rivals Flipkart and Snapdeal operate as marketplaces where they merely lend their platforms for other vendors to sell products to consumers. A major challenge is delivery of the goods: the seller may be far away from the warehouses, or fulfillment centres from where e-commerce companies traditionally process the shipments. The Easy Ship model takes care of this problem, because the sellers don't have to first deliver the products to the fulfillment centres. For the consumer, this avoids delivery delays. Flipkart and Snapdeal also use similar models.

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Amazon is confident that the model that was a game-changer for the company in India could work with small retailers in other nations as well, he said.Ayear into India after entering the country in 2013, Amazon realised that it would require more than its global 'Fulfillment by Amazon' logistics mechanism and a better sellerfriendly delivery model to boost its growth in the country, which offered huge potential for ecommerce.

The company launched Easy Ship in April last year. It already accounts for 60% of Amazon's total shipments, reaching out to as much as 13,000 of the total 20,000 vendors on Amazon's platform.

"It is a very important part of our growth story," Agarwal said. "So, when we look at India, we have 'Fulfillment by Amazon' where sellers use Amazon logistics and warehouses. Through Easy Ship sellers are able to use (only) our logistics and delivery capabilities."

In an interview in September, Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, lauded the Amazon India team for such efforts. "One of the things that I really admire about our team here in India is how much invention they are doing," he told ET. "I am excited about our ability to export some of that invention to the rest of the world.

"Amazon is currently piloting another India-specific technological and delivery initiative in Bengaluru. It involves five neighbourhood stores to deliver groceries to consumers as part of the company's plans to enroll legions of mom-and-pop stores to sell their products on the Amazon platform. "We are trying out different models because our ambition is to scale (up)," Agarwal said in an interview in New Delhi on Sunday.

"It is easy to test in a small sub-set, but when you want to scale (up) then you want to make sure that every order the customer places they get reliable services. It is an innovation that was built in India for India."