Flipkart strengthens Kirana delivery with 100k partners for festive season

Over 100,000 Kirana stores to be supply-chain partners to deliver millions of packages in more than 10,000 pincodes

Ahead of the upcoming festive season and flagship festive sale event, Big Billion Days, e-commerce giant Flipkart has announced the strengthening of its ‘Kirana Delivery Program’. The programme helps onboard local general trade stores as delivery partners. 

This festive season, Walmart-owned Flipkart has strengthened its Kirana delivery program with more than 100,000 Kirana partners from across the country that will deliver millions of shipments during the festive season. Last year, more than 10 million deliveries were made by these specially trained kirana partners across the country during the festive season.

“Flipkart is committed to creating value for all our stakeholders including sellers, MSMEs, artisans, customers and kiranas,” said Hemant Badri, senior vice-president, supply chain at Flipkart. “Being one of the oldest retail formats in India, kiranas form the premise of modern retail in India and Flipkart endeavours to bring seamless assimilation of both forms of retail to bring customer delight and create a shared value.”

Badri said through a combination of their hyperlocal presence and innovations by Flipkart, the kirana delivery program has become a great enabler in strengthening the kirana ecosystem in the country. “This will play a pivotal role in offering faster and personalised delivery experience to customers during this festive season and our annual flagship event, the Big Billion Days (BBD), and augment the income of these kirana partners,” said Badri.

Flipkart started the program to help local stores and shops get on board as delivery partners in 2019, and since then, has invested consistently to get these businesses ready for making deliveries. Flipkart has a dedicated team as part of this ongoing partnership that helps the Kiranas with knowledge, expertise, experience and technology to make millions of deliveries seamlessly. With a 100,000 strong Kirana delivery network that doubled from last year, Flipkart is further strengthening its last-mile network and reach. This is being done especially in pin-codes and towns that are difficult to reach and creating opportunities for digital upskilling as well as additional income for kiranas.

This festive season will see the participation of Kiranas from regions including Khammam (Telangana), Bareilly (Uttar Pradesh) and Junagarh (Odisha), to name a few, as consumers seek safe and timely deliveries through e-commerce.

The Kirana Delivery Program has seen consistent growth in the past three years and today accounts for nearly one-third of Flipkart’s deliveries made in a month. This is further augmenting the speed and reach of the deliveries and supplementing the income of the Kirana partners. In the past year itself, Flipkart’s kirana partners have registered a nearly 30 per cent increase in the delivery income.

To help kiranas onboard and be active participants in the festive season, Flipkart started months ahead through contactless onboarding aided by online application forms. It invited kirana partners to directly upload their details along with required documentation. Post a detailed verification check, the kirana partners were brought into the program, imparted training through specially created technology tools, including app-based dashboards and digital payments.

Flipkart said it has invested heavily in setting up a tech-enabled supply chain to help lakhs of sellers.

Flipkart's rival Amazon recently said that over 11,000 offline retailers and neighbourhood stores from Maharashtra are now part of ‘Local Shops on Amazon’.With the upcoming festive season, e-commerce firm Amazon said it is focused on helping Local Shops sellers grow their business and recover from the recent economic disruption caused by the pandemic.