E-commerce Cos Fighting On Delivery Time

After years of competing on the discount plank, yet another 'd’ is threatening to be a game-changer for e-commerce companies. Online retailers have woken up to the importance of quickest delivery, and are getting ready to fight in that space aggressively. 

While Myntra, an inventory-led e-commerce company, set the ball rolling by announcing a pilot project that ensures delivery within an hour in Delhi and Bangalore, others are strategizing too, to drastically cut the journey time of a product from the e-tailer’s warehouse to customer. 

 

“The idea behind this is to match the time a consumer takes to shop when he goes out to a mall,”  said Mukesh Bansal, CEO, Myntra. Rivals argued that although faster delivery continues to be the objective, deliveries on the same day or within few hours have many logistic challenges.

 

Homeshop18 also claimed it delivered certain products in one hour, company COO Narsimha Jayakumar pointed out, “you can’t stretch this idea to all categories and across the country”. Faster delivery would mean more stocking points, which is not easy given the infrastructure challenges of India. 

 

Even so, leading players are not lost to the advantage of fast delivery. In certain locations, Flipkart, which recently announced its shift from inventory-led to marketplace format,  has started delivering some products like books within an hour, though this is not a feature advertised on its website yet. 

 

Snapdeal, also a marketplace player, is planning to cut its delivery time as well. It wants to come up with offers with delivery in one day for across the country. A lot from Snapdeal is already delivered in 24 hours. “Our endeavour is to ensure customers of speedy deliveries not just in metros but also in tier 2 and tier 3 cities,” said Sandeep Komaravelly, Vice President, Marketing, Snapdeal. But he added that its tough to sustain a model with warehouses everywhere as logistic cost is high in India.

 

You may call it the eBay effect. Through tieups with retail chains like Best Buy, Target and Macy’s, eBay started delivering products within an hour in some American cities earlier this year. Meanwhile, the other biggies Amazon and Walmart are established players in same-day delivery, competing big-time with their brick and mortar counterparts.