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Article snippet: MUMBAI, India — Americans shopping on Amazon.com this holiday season may find that the best deals for popular gifts like leather shoes and luxury bedding are coming from an unexpected source: Indian merchants. Amazon, always on the lookout for ways to lower prices, has been aggressively recruiting Indian vendors to sell their goods directly on the e-commerce giant’s American site. At least 27,000 Indian sellers have signed up since Amazon began the outreach two years ago. They range from giants like the Tata Group, a conglomerate that hawks its Titan watch line on the site, to smaller firms like The Boho Street, a peddler of vegan tapestries, incense and handcrafted copper mugs. The result is lower prices for consumers because selling foreign goods through the e-commerce giant cuts out some of the usual costs of a traditional importer. But it is also beneficial to Amazon, which gets to add to its enormous product lineup and charge sellers hefty fees. For Indian merchants like Abhishek Middha, founder of The Boho Street, Amazon provides almost turnkey access to the American market. “Amazon handles everything in the U.S., from shipping to customer handling, so we can focus on making the best quality products and adding more products to our catalog,” he said. Although Mr. Middha used to sell on other marketplaces like Etsy, he switched almost entirely to Amazon two years ago because of its vast scale and suite of services. Last year, his sales on Cyber Monday spiked... Link to the full article to read more