E commerce companies back in action: Thousands of orders placed after the relaxation

Demand for non-essentials skyrockets

Tuesday, 5th May 2020

As the lockdown was relaxed on Monday, the demand for non-essentials skyrockets and e-commerce companies are back in action.

MHA permitted e-commerce companies like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal and others to continue their services in orange and green zones from Monday and thousands of orders for non-essentials were placed.

A source at Amazon reported, “Baby clothes and electrical appliances have witnessed maximum pick-up on Amazon. Volume is close to pre-Covid days which included red zones too while sellers are forced to ramp up faster than they expected”, to Finance Express Online.

A Partner Support Fund was recently announced by Amazon for small and midsize package delivery businesses and some of the transportation partners. Among Amazon’s 5.5 lakh sellers, most of them are small businesses.

A spokesperson from Amazon said, “Thousands of sellers have started receiving orders for the first time since the lockdown began in March. We are hopeful that this will help jumpstart the livelihood of many small sellers and their workforce. We urge the government to allow an expanded list of priority products in the red zone as well”.

Snapdeal reported, “Thousands of our sellers received orders”, on Monday. Snapdeal added that the company is sure of “80-90 per cent of our sellers in the orange and green zones to become active over the course of this week”. It had received 35% of orders from green zone and more than 40% from orange zones.  

A source said, “Volume grew multi-fold from yesterday (Sunday) for Snapdeal but not yet close to pre-Covid level. The order volumes are expected to grow steadily as more sellers become operational on the company's marketplace and more areas become serviceable”, to Financial Express Online.

The products which were in demand on Snapdeal were home and kitchen appliances, the spokesperson reported.  

Summer clothes like t-shirts, shorts, crop tops and so on were the next section on demand. Data cables, earphones, mobile phone chargers and other electronic accessories were also in great demand. Utkarsh Sinha, Bexley advisors’ Managing Doctor stated, “This is likely an expression of pent-up demand during the lockdown. While basics were made available, albeit, with scarcity, a lot of necessity and aspiration based shopping was suppressed. These segments were expected to be overweight just post-recovery, and their share of the overall basket will likely stabilize over time”.

It would take up to 14 days to deliver the orders that were placed on Monday.

“Our industry-first network design that leverages technology to smartly locate warehouses, sortation centers and delivery hubs have helped us maximize speed and selection”, said a Flipkart spokesperson. Flipkart stressed on the efficient use of technology in order to manage the process. The company was keen on observing the guidelines given by the government for delivering the products.

A change is customer behavior is expected and there will be higher demand on e-commerce retails due to Covid situation. Now the customers will prefer ordering products online.  

Sinha added, “This behavior is easily extendible to other categories and to other platforms. Those who were holdouts and tried BigBasket for the first time now will likely be more open to trying Amazon or Flipkart too”.

Source: MSN