Ecommerce marketplaces’ last mile delivery turning into a car boot sale

The first round of the lucrative festive sales has recently got over, with ecommerce biggie’s heralding the success of the event. Snapdeal has seen its revenue grow seventeen times during the festive week. Elsewhere, in the first ten hours of its Big Billion Days sale, Flipkart sold ten lakh items, while on the first day of the Great Indian Festive sale, Amazon declared it to be the biggest day in the history of Amazon.in.

Delivery dilemma

There is no time to bask in the glory of the prosperous sales, as all the ordered products have to be delivered. This is not turning out to be an easy task, as the ecommerce marketplaces can only have their trucks and vans on the Delhi-NCR highways at limited times.

This is clearly hampering the delivery of goods and it has even been reported that some companies have taken the law into their own hands by having products delivered in private cars, which has quite literally given a new phrase to the term 'car boot sale'.

Going by the rules, driving licences can be revoked if driver's are caught delivering goods in car types such as:

• Sedans

• Hatchbacks

• SUV's

"E-commerce firms are demanding such cars from us (transporters) and stuffing goods to their maximum limit and sending them to desired location, We are ready to dispatch their goods in our cars as long as they (e-Commerce firms) pay us well,” said one of the transporters.

Time for contingency plan

Keeping in mind this years festive sales, the ecommerce companies spent huge amounts of money to ramp up back-end logistics, which included opening up more fulfilment centres and joining hands with courier companies to take care of last mile delivery.

With this latest development it seems like there is still a lot more work to be done and quickly. The festive period which runs until December has only just begun and the consumers voracious appetite for buying online goods doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon.