Samir Kumar’s big task for Amazon India: Make the e-commerce giant truly ‘the everything store’

Samir Kumar doesn’t mince words. “Look around this room. That nail on the wall, that cable on the floor, the faucet leaking in your bathroom… I’m not sure we sell the right version of any of

those yet,” the Amazon India country manager tells Fortune India.

The candid admission by the head of the online retailer—famously dubbed ‘the everything store’—may sound surprising. But in India, ‘the everything store’ is still a work in progress for

Amazon.

Few people know Amazon India as well as Kumar does. Having joined the company as a systems engineer in 1999, he helped Amit Agarwal (now senior vice president for emerging markets) set up

the company’s development centre in India in 2004. He returned in 2012 to lay the groundwork for the launch of Amazon.in. He terms these formative years as the most rewarding in his career.

Now, at the helm of Amazon India, Kumar, a company veteran, has a far more complex mandate: to live up to the promise of ‘the everything store’.

He is pushing for an aggressive expansion, not only in speed through the quick commerce pilots, but also in selection. Amazon India reveals a strategic gap less obvious to most of its

customers in the selection frontier. For all its vastness, the platform still doesn’t have a comprehensive assortment of the real-world goods Indian consumers increasingly demand.

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