The e-commerce industry and online shopping trend are growing rapidly in India and retailers have come up with attractive delivery options. For instance, Flipkart introduced In a Day Delivery and Same Day Delivery options already. Now, the e-commerce portal giant appears to be planning to launch a new option under which it will delivering the goods ordered by customers to their doorsteps in just three hours.
Flipkart is currently evaluating the products and cities that will be appropriate to start with this delivery option. It is also considering on the pricing to be assigned for this service, but it could be launched in a time frame of six months.
Regarding this, Sujeet Kumar, Head of WS Retail and ekart Logistics claimed that they still have to figure out the technology and the pricing for such delivery services. He added that such services are necessity driven and could be useful when a customer wants to gets something he needs immediately. However, he declined to reveal on when ekart will debut with this service.
He also claimed in an interview last week that Flipkart will have to provide a viable business model as it will be expensive for the customers. Now, it is believed that the firm will start the within three hours delivery service in three to four cities by July 2015.
InIndia, the e-commerce industry has grown steeply in the last few years. Flipkart is one of the top three e-tailing firms including Snapdeal and AmazonIndiaas well and all of them provide same day delivery in the major cities for a specific delivery fee. Definitely, the faster delivery services will be a game changer in the already fierce competitive e-commerce industry. It will contribute to the growth of the segment further as it will be shorten the shopping time that will lure more customers.
As per Karan Girotra, Professor of Sustainable Development at Insead, the retailers have to consider two significant things to get this work right. Firstly, they will have to select a small set of products that are available in such smaller time frames. The next thing is that they will have to require organizations that will build different logistics to meet this delivery promise. For instance, there should be several warehouses of the retailers in the central parts of the cities to make this work effectively.
