As the E-commerce industry in India is growing it is being accompanied by various challenges that are inhibiting its growth rate. Some of the challenges are very local , prevalent only in the Indian subcontinent. Some of the major challenges in Ecommerce fulfilment in India are as follow:
Hight Cost: The cost of logistics in india is very hight compared to the other nations due to lack of infrastructure and aslo the concept of Cash on delivery adds extra burden in the logistics part due to cash handling requirement which consumes more time and labour.
High returns of orders: Currently about 15-20% of the shipments is shipment due to returns in the orders. As the e-commerce have ventured into a wide range of product category, in order to capture a huge user base, most of the e-commerce company providers free return policy. the cost of the returns is significant and aslo it possesses the challenges to logistics and warehouse management.
Poor infrastructure:There is immense growth in consumption driven demand from tier-2 and tier-3 cities,but due to lack of warehousing and infrastrure,cost related to e-commerce fulfilment for delivering goods to tier 2 and tier 3 cities increases.Due to lack of proper warehouse in tier 2 and tier 3 cities,the goods needed to be stored at faraway locations and due to which there is significant shipping cost and also more time is required in the shipment.
But to mitigate the effects of the challenges there has been some innovations in e-commerce fulfilment which are expected to be implemented in future:
Partnership with local shops: Many shipment players are gettings into Partnership with local shop so that they can drop the customers goods and the customers can collect it at their own convenience. It would help to save the time and fuel cost of the last mile delivery due to availability of customers and needs to reach customer multiple time to deliver the good.
Locker facility:A locker facility could be provided to customers at some strategics location with one one time access to pick up their convenience.It would help the logistics company to save the fuel cost and the time in last mile delivery would be saved.
AI and IOT: IOT can be integrated with various supply mechanisms, and it would be useful in real time tracking of the goods.It would also halp in providing the other critical information like the conditions in which the goods are being transported.For some goods the temperature plays a critical role so IOT can used to get real time data about such parameters.AI would be useful in streamlining the operations and accurate predication about the goods required.It would help to enable an efficient warehousing operation with effective prediction about the demand of the good.
Automated delivery : With innovation coming up in the technology,drones and unmanned vehicle have enable the delivery without the need of human intervention.The drone can be used to deliver the goods to customer very efficiently and it would be able to deliver.it in a less time as it does not need to face the road congestion. The drone would also be using in saving the fuel cost and contribute towards the green environment.
This Blog is contributed by Mr Shail Shah who is pursuing his MBA from IIM kashipur.
Godamwale is Saas based flexible warehousing provider which help companies reduce their logistics cost and better decision making with help of data analytics from its proprietary supply chain platform Inciflo. The company provides 3PL services in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune , Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai and 80 more cities on pay per model with no long term contracts and no space minimums. Godamwale also provides seamless integrated scalable fulfilment solutions across india with its state of art centres and tech system integrated with marketplaces, warehouses and last mile deliveries.
