Amazon Karigar - What it holds for you as an Artisan

This is the story of the artisans, craftsmen, or Karigars from different corners and nooks of the country. Such artistic talent flows throughout our country. These sellers work hard every day to bring out cultures and traditions to our daily lives through their beautiful artifacts. But although these lakhs of artisans are creating handicrafts in bulk, they couldn’t reach a wide mass as expected. There was a gap in demand and supply. Why?

The real problem was providing a massive marketplace for these products. Each art form sells in its own local market and mostly in an offline market, restricting its reach to a larger mass. These local artisans need a global marketplace to sell their products.

Amazon recognized this gap and is working on bridging it. Feeling the need to provide a special place for such sellers on Amazon to catch everyone’s attention, Amazon has launched a dedicated program for artisans – Amazon Karigar.

Amazon Karigar is a program to enable and support the Indian artisans and their artforms. Through the program, Amazon aims to help the artisans in building their businesses and increasing chances of them becoming successful on Amazon. Amazon Karigar brings forth authentic collection directly from all the artisans from across all corners of India. To drive this initiative, Amazon also has a dedicated store on Amazon.in to try and get more visibility to these handicraft and handloom products. The store is designed to encourage such artisans to sell handicrafts and encourage people to support them and buy their products. Amazon Karigar engages with various government and handicraft bodies to onboard more sellers. The online store includes products in different categories like handloom, handicraft, and other Made in India products. Today, Amazon Karigar has over 8 lakh weavers, with 60,000 products and 270+ unique art forms from over 20 states.

Joining Amazon has changed the lives of many artisans and craftsmen. For example, Majikhan’s Mudwork business has seen 2X QoQ growth, similarly, a couple who decided to keep the blue pottery art alive and started a business of it is today seeing a 631% increase in sales since launch.

Amazon has partnered with several government bodies to help the artisans come forward and gain recognition for their work. These emporiums are from varied fields of art, crafts, and culture to provide market connectivity to the Karigars.

The partners act as the bridge between the artisans and Amazon. They identify the potential artisans and get them on boarded on the marketplace. They support the sellers in kickstarting their business by facilitating all the required help like documentation, registration, etc.

Amazon Karigar offers various benefits and services to the sellers to help them grow and establish their brands. Here are some of these benefits Karigar sellers enjoy.

To support the local artisans and sellers, Amazon.in has subsidized its Referral Fee or Sell on Amazon (SoA) fee. This is the fee that every seller has to pay to sell on Amazon. For Artisans, this fee is capped at 8% or less, depending on the category the sellers sell in. The aim is to make the selling on Amazon feasible for all and encourage more artisans to join Amazon Karigar to sell their exquisite artifacts across the country.

Most of the artisans and craftsmen being new to e-commerce and online selling may have limited knowledge of it. To make their experience as easy and smooth as possible, Karigar sellers are provided personal training to help them guide them through the marketplace. These training sessions are both offline and online (through webinars).

Understanding the seller account and its management on their own can get a little trickier for some or most of the Karigar sellers. That’s why Amazon steps up to help the fellow artisans in handling their seller accounts during their business launch. Amazon representatives guide them through the entire selling process so they do not lag behind.

What’s seen more, sells more.
And what looks better, sells better!
The artisans create such fine handicrafts and it’s important that the beauty of these products reaches the eyes of every customer. As the sellers launch their business, Amazon helps make these products more appealing by providing an HD photoshoot. Amazon also assists Karigars in product cataloging. This helps them get their accounts live quicker and start selling.

The beautiful creations by the talented Karigars deserve all the attention.
Once their products are live, they need people to recognize them. Amazon’s special store Amazon Karigar is the perfect place for all their handmade products. People searching for handmade artifacts can directly go to Amazon Karigar store and buy their favorite handmade products, instead of searching for them among millions of products at Amazon.in. It gives these handicrafts potentially faster and higher visibility among customers.

Amazon has various marketing channels to promote handmade and Made in India products and encourage people to buy more of these products. Amazon also promotes Karigar products on various platforms like Amazon.in home page, social media, digital ads, PR, and through influencer marketing.
Amazon has several initiatives like Small business day and Smbhv dedicated to promoting local handmade products and small and medium businesses. Stand for Handmade initiative launched in June 2020, a 10 weeks high decibel campaign meant to support artisans with a jumpstart post lockdown has seen sellers grow their business by leaps and bounds. Seller got a complete waiver on Sell on Amazon fee for the 10 week duration. Amazon Karigar collaborated with Vidya Balan and Amazon Prime to spread more awareness.

Over time, the Amazon Karigar program has only expanded. The program has grown by 200% in 2019. The aim is to expand it further to engage more such sellers and selections and support the local art forms, while benefiting the artisans.

Are you looking for an opportunity and a marketplace to flourish your handicraft business? Amazon Karigar store is the place for you, and now is the right time to join with all these benefits at your disposal. You can be a part of the stories shown in the video too. Want to know more about selling handmade products? Read here. Join Amazon Karigar today, utilize your talent and skills, and grow them into a potentially successful business.