Because what they have launched is basically a price comparison site not an ecommerce destination. In that light, launching as Amazon.in would not have been good for the brand and/or might have caused some confusion, IMO.

FDI has been a problem in India, and as far as I understand, Amazon can't do business here yet.

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-01-30/news...

We have pretty quaint notions about FDI. Foreign capital is always looked at with distrust (at least by the older set of politicians) so there is a lot of political hand-wringing about how allowing 100% FDI in retail will destroy small traders, etc. Of course, this stance is also encouraged by food suppliers/speculators, so this will take some time to work itself out. But most people say allowing 100% FDI in retail is only a few months away. So Amazon might just be preparing ground for a eventual entry.

I'm curious about this too. Does Amazon have a bad reputation there? They also seem to mention themselves as little as possible on the site... the Kindle is "made by Kindle" rather than Amazon, etc.

Yeah they've got prominent links in the footer, but it just feels like they've tried to mention themselves as little as they can as you peruse the site.

Because Junglee has a coolness factor associated with it.

Junglee is the other company (first one was Hotmail) that literally gave birth to tech entreprenurship as a career choice in India.

I would say that this was a branding win.