Exploring tier 2 & tier 3 cities and other rural areas has always been on every ecommerce companies’ to-do list. But last mile delivery and other logistics issues stood in the way. To combat that ecommerce biggies Amazon and Flipkart have floated pilot projects that are helping them to deliver their products in rural areas with any hiccups.
In Tumkur district of Karnataka, Amazon roped in a local man from the village nearby to deliver the order in and around the remote district. The young man, Doddaiah, who delivers Amazon’s packages said, “Unlike big cities where ecommerce delivery guys spend hours on the road carrying heavy packages, life is much more simple here I can deliver 12 packages in a couple of hours.”
This unique model has dropped Amazon’s delivery time from a week to just 2-3 days. Thanks to this pilot project, which was rolled out a month back, the marketplace now dispatches approximately 150 packages in and around Tumkur as opposed to 10 packages in the beginning.
These local distribution centres enables online companies to fill the gap between demand and supply. Madan Padaki, the founder of Head Held High that handles these distribution centres for marketplaces said, “We are trying to create a rural-urban bridge. These centres will provide distribution, customer acquisition, lead generation and sales as a service to ecommerce companies.”
Flipkart too initiated a similar plan last year when they got native entrepreneurs to sell Motorola phones to rural consumers. The local network of people not only marketed the product for Flipkart but also placed orders and delivered the product to the buyers.
With nearly 70% of Indian population concentrated in the rural areas, exploring the untapped rural areas will yield huge profits is known to all. What adds to the allure is that rural internet users is going to multiply five times and is set to touch 28 crore by 2018. Which means a large portion of rural consumers will have internet on their smartphones to shop online. All they need is an ecommerce company that is ready to deliver at their doorstep.
Ecommerce companies are not just building pick-up & drop points by tying up with local shops in rural areas to smoothen the delivery process. But they also plan involve rural folks in ecommerce growth cycle. For instance, employing rural India, starting training programs, taking on-board and promote sellers from small cities and outsourcing miscellaneous business such as packing & cataloguing to rural sellers. This highlights the fact that small rural cities are going to be game changers for etailers in the coming years.
Editor team is specialized in introducing the marketplace content targeting the Indian online sellers. They plan and coordinate to bring the appealing content for the small businesses on how to partner with the e-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart and strategies for improving their online business.
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