Amazon launched its Easy Ship service earlier this year to facilitate sellers to make faster deliveries at lower shipping rates. However, multiple hurdles were faced by sellers in the following months, like slower pickup of parcels and deliveries, and frequent follow-ups to ensure parcels get sent out, and so on.
Earlier, the Easy Ship service did not include product returns. But now Amazon India has expanded the features under this service to include product returns also, to provide a complete end-to-end logistics service to sellers availing of this service.
Previously, Easy Ship worked on this model:
In a bid to make it a complete logistics solution for sellers, Easy Ship will now include product return services too. Amazon has started a pilot on this in ten Indian cities – Gurgaon, Faridabad, Goa, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Madurai, Salem, Vellore, Chennai and Coimbatore.
In the initial phase, the pilot is limited to seven product categories – precious jewellery, luggage and bags, books, music, movies and DVD, sports and fitness, and video games.
“While customers would benefit as they no longer have to figure out how to return a package and which carrier to choose, sellers too will benefit from a better customer experience and do not have to worry about arranging returns,” Amit Deshpande, general manager at Amazon Seller Services said.
So far, Easy Ship has had tremendous response from the sellers and around 16,000 sellers use it for their operations. According to Amazon, 25 percent of orders placed on its site come under this service.
Although easy ship was introduced in India alone, Amazon plans to extend it to other global markets and making it on the lines of its ‘Fulfillment by Amazon’ (FBA) service. While inventory is stored in the warehouses in the FBA model, whereas inventory is in the control of the seller under the easy ship service. In fact, easy ship was rolled out to make headway in the Indian market by giving more control to sellers with respect to inventory.
“Our seller base is rapidly expanding. Our desire is to give the sellers full flexibility of either using Easy Ship or Fulfilment by Amazon in every city,” Deshpande said.
After dwindling with her family business, into travel and hospitality, for more than 3 years, Pooja Vishant found her true love in writing. Happy-go-lucky and cheerful, she loves pink; so pink is the way to go if you want to get into her good books. The Associate Editor keeps track of even a leaf that has moved in the ecommerce world!
Leave a Comment
