E-com firms gear for faster delivery in festival season
The festival season brings a surge in traffic for e-commerce companies. But converting this traffic into successful sales requires surmounting the logistical hurdle.
The festival season brings a surge in traffic for e-commerce companies. But converting this traffic into successful sales requires surmounting the logistical hurdle.
The difficulty in handling large number of orders became evident from Flipkart’s big billion day sales, whose first edition in October 2014 turned out to be a logistical failure. Many are building spare capacity and partnering with third-party delivery handlers.
Flipkart expects an unprecedented 500,000 deliveries every day through the first week of October. “This is the time when the supply chain gets chocked… The hiring increases and then you need to get rid of the people once the surge falls,” said Neeraj Aggarwal, head of supply chain operations at Flipkart.
It is banking on alternative delivery channels. It has partnered with more than 3,000 Apollo Pharmacy outlets, from where can collect their orders. It has partnered with 1,300 neighbourhood stores to deliver in localities, and another 1,300 people have been contracted to serve just-in-time deliveries.
Amazon on the other hand has partnered with 12,500 neighbourhood stores, up from 2,500 last year, who will stock and deliver orders. “We have also established a service partner network – 250 of them – and given them the technology to handle and deliver orders,” said Akhil Saxena, V-P, customer fulfillment at Amazon.
“Clients say that the load pattern which will spike beginning October, might go up by four to five times compared to last year,” said Sivram SD, vice-president for corporate strategy, Ecom Express, which counts Flipkart, Amazon and Snap deal as its clients. It is increasing the frequency of trucks up to three times to handle the surge.
Shop-Clues is also preparing. “We have partnered with firms (last year it was 27)… The idea is to have a deeper rural reach,” said Vishal Sharma, V-P, operations at Shop-Clues, which has increased its pin codes’ to 32,000.
Snap deal has booked 20,000 tonnes of air cargo, and is prepared to ship 2.5 million orders the next day.