Quick delivery helps earn customer loyalty and seller appreciation as it brings down product returns. Online retailer Flipkart has attempted to make efficient delivery affordable to online sellers and introduced Smart Fulfilment to improve the order delivery process. Its logistics arm, Ekart has also tied up with 700 kirana stores to assist with last mile delivery.

“Faster delivery of products is always beneficial for sellers, as it helps them garner more orders, however, can be logistically challenging. Sellers expect positive reviews and ratings when a customer receives a product delivered in shorter duration,” said Flipkart marketplace head, Anil Goteti.

Enhancing delivery speed

To make ecommerce deliveries even faster, the etailer plans to have75% of its sellers under the Express Program by next month. At the moment about half of the marketplace units are under this program. That amounts to over 1.5 crore products. According to Flipkart, the Express Program is making significant progress as it enhances customer experiences.

 “To ensure, sellers meet the expected standard of delivery and in turn grow in their businesses, Flipkart’s Express Program helps sellers mark all the orders ready to dispatch, within 2 hours of receiving it. This has brought in a significant spike in the total number of orders, including exceptional customer experience,” Goteti stated.

The Express Program by Flipkart began in May 2016, with only 1.6% of units. It now covers all metropolitan cities in India plus 31 non-metro cities like Indore and Jalandhar. The etailer claims that sellers are advancing significantly in terms of service metrics with reduced order cancellations and order delivery dates improving considerably.

How to join the Express Program?

To register under the Express Program sellers must:

• Be gold or silver sellers on Flipkart
• Receive more 10 orders on a daily basis

Delivery capacity improving?

The RedSeer E-Tailing Delivery Excellence Report-CY16 stated that delivery time on average was approximately 4-7 days during the calendar year 2016, which is now somewhat the same. But, the report also claimed that unlike before ecommerce delivery has become more reliable, that is the difference in delivery time between the slowest etailer and the fastest etailer in days. In 2015, it was 4 days but by 2016 it was 1.9 days.

The report also mentioned that express or faster deliveries, which are orders delivered in 2 day are on the rise, mainly due to initiatives my marketplaces