Amazon India PPC Guide

Amazon India (amazon.in) opened in June 2013 and is a domestic marketplace in the fullest sense. Selling there normally means an Indian tax identity in the form of a PAN, an Indian bank account, a pickup address in the country and, for most taxable goods, a GST registration, and none of that carries across from a North American or European account. Catalogue, inventory and advertising history all start again, so the sensible way to read your first months of India data is as a launch rather than as an extension of an established brand.

The shopping vocabulary is the second thing that surprises sellers. Listings are written in English and the search box takes Latin characters, but Indian product words are routinely typed in those characters rather than translated. A kurta, a chakki or a chappal is searched by its local name spelled in English letters, and transliteration has no single agreed spelling, so one word can arrive as several distinct search terms. Keyword coverage in India is therefore a spelling problem as much as a translation problem, and the evidence for it lives in your own search term report rather than in a translated word list.

The trading year is shaped by the festive calendar rather than by one fixed retail date. Amazon runs its Great Indian Festival event around the festive season, and the festivals it sits alongside, Navratri, Dussehra and Diwali among them, follow a lunisolar calendar, so they land on different Gregorian dates each year. Republic Day in January and Independence Day in August do not move. Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display are all available on amazon.in, so the advertising toolkit itself is familiar. What has to be rebuilt is the calendar, the tax arithmetic behind your break-even, and the search vocabulary.