E-Commerce Players Prep Ahead Of Resuming Operations
With the center’s decision to allow all e-commerce goods sales from April 20 and few states like Orissa, Rajasthan, Maharashtra have given permits already, the e-commerce firms are readying themselves to resume full-blown operations. Flipkart’s analytics teams are supporting sellers with market intelligence to ensure smooth listing on the platforms. The company informs that the Flipkart’s seller side is providing constant counsel and on-ground support to sellers on its platform to help them resume operations in a few days.
In fact, for some time, the e-commerce companies have been keeping track of the huge demands from the consumers that they were getting in the non-essential categories. Srinivas Mothey, Senior Vice President, Paytm Mall, stated, "The government’s decision would help a host of non-essential goods merchants as they had to stop operations during this period of lockdown. We believe that there is going to be a massive demand for electronics, mobile phones and accessories as many of our consumers have been reaching out to us to know when these categories would be live again." The company notifies that they are already speaking to brands and their merchant partners so that they can start - can go live - with all categories on Paytm Mall. A leading B2B e-commerce platform Shakedeal has shared that the company is using its operations experts to optimize the scheduling and routing of orders amongst our cloud fc’s and vendor partners to streamline the supply of all orders - essential and non-essential.
Challenge of workers shortage?
Despite everything, the e-commerce firms continue to face challenges of shortage of workers as most of them have fled their homes. E-commerce logistics company Rapid Delivery informed that they had seen only a 60 per cent of field force return due to a) workers are scared to leave homes b) workers left for their hometowns and villages before the lockdown was enforced. Another e-commerce firm shared they are having difficulty providing even the 20 per cent of the field force required. Given the rising fears of Covid pandemic and the shortage of workers henceforth, the question of how much of the latest enabling developments could help is in question.
