Ahead of the festive season, e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart have ramped up their logistics and fulfilment investments in tier 2 and 3 markets such as Unnao, Varanasi, Guwahati and Patna. While Amazon has added three new fulfilment centres, Flipkart has expanded its footprint by 11 centres, mostly concentrated in tier 2 and 3 markets.
Estimates say that the large e-commerce platforms are likely to see up to a fourfold surge in order processing at their fulfilment centres this festive season. Besides expanding their fulfilment centre footprint, companies are also deploying some level of automation as well to ensure shorter delivery times, despite the expected surge in orders.
“Real-time inventory management and scalable fulfilment and last-mile operations are critical to meeting customer expectations during this (the festive) period. The company has also expanded its footprint with the addition of new fulfilment centres in regions such as Unnao, Varanasi, Kolkata, etc…we have inaugurated 11 fulfilment centres ahead of this year’s festive season,” Hemant Badri, senior vice-president and head of supply chain, customer experience and re-commerce, Flipkart Group, said.
Both Amazon and Flipkart kick off their respective flagship festive season sales on September 27, with the former’s Prime members getting access to the sale from September 26.
Amazon has identified the north and east markets in India to strengthen its customer facing logistics in order to affect shorter delivery times.
The e-commerce giant said in a blogpost that the over 1.2 million cubic feet of combined storage space of the new centres will help with faster delivery of customer orders across the northern and eastern states. The new centres will support more than 250,000 sellers across Delhi-NCR, Bihar and Assam.
“We have added three new fulfilment centres to our existing pan-India operations network that consists of over 43 million cubic feet of storage space, sort centres in 19 states, about 2,000 delivery stations, Amazon Air, our partnerships with Indian Railways, India Post, and much more,” Abhinav Singh, vice-president of operations at Amazon India, said.
Not only the e-commerce giants, but direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are also preparing for the festive season surge in orders as they see consumption trends rebound. In addition to beefing up their supply chain and procurement, brands are also using technology to be better prepared for the festive season increase in orders.
“Our data science and revenue teams collaborate to develop in-depth models that determine the optimal inventory levels at strategic locations across the country,” Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, director and co-founder at Wakefit, a D2C mattress and sleep accessory brand, said. Technology is at the focus for all e-commerce platforms as they adopt automation at their warehouses to varying degrees.
For example, Flipkart’s Haringhata (Big Box) fulfilment centre in West Bengal, spread across 110 acre with 5 million cubic feet of storage, employs technologies such as robotic arms and automated storage and retrieval systems, enabling rapid processing and dispatch of orders. It has also deployed automated guided vehicles to automatically sort packages based on PIN codes at its Bengaluru sorting centre. The focus on automation has also been concentrated in tier 2 and 3 cities.
“We are seeing demand for (automation) products like automated sorters, conveyors, and smaller fulfillment systems. Just this year, we have supplied 30 sorters to facilities across 15 tier 2 and 3 cities,” Nirav Doshi, founder and managing director of Nido Machineries, an intralogistics firm, said.
