Despite govt clearance, ecomm firms find it difficult to deliver essentials

Delivery of essential items such as food, groceries and medical supplies, ordered by customers from e-commerce sites, has been disrupted even after state governments exempted e-commerce services from the ongoing widespread lockdowns till March 31, prominent e-tailers told ET.

“We are not operational due to restrictions imposed by local authorities on the movement of goods in spite of clear guidelines provided by the central authorities to enable essential services,” BigBasket informed customers through its app on Tuesday.

The country’s largest e-grocer has stopped accepting orders in Gurugram and Mumbai till further notice, while operations at several other regions are at lower than normal capacity.

Local authorities are shutting down warehouses and stopping trucks from crossing state borders, hampering the availability of essential goods for a third consecutive day, especially in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Hyderabad, the e-commerce companies claimed. ET could not independently verify these claims.

Ecommerce behemoth Amazon removed all non-essential items from its India marketplace to ensure that the most important needs were met first. The company warned customers of increased cancellations and delays in deliveries in some regions.

“We continue to make changes to our logistics, transportation, supply chain, purchasing, and seller processes to prioritise stocking and delivering priority products like household staples, health and hygiene products, sanitizers, baby formula, and medical supplies,” Amazon said in a statement.

E-commerce companies are faced with a manpower shortage as delivery personnel are refusing to show up at work amid the virus outbreak.

Absenteeism by delivery partners, warehousing staff and call centre executives has risen to as high as 75-80%.

The curfew-like situation across states, being implemented as blanket bans on all businesses across cities, have cut off first-mile and last-mile logistics for e-commerce firms, effectively choking their businesses.

“On March 23, there was a 40% drop in the number of e-commerce deliveries across India and return to origin or RTO orders saw a massive increase by 330%,” said Pranshu Kacholia, Vice President of Business at logistics intelligence platform Clickpost.

“This will single-handedly put a lot of burden on e-commerce companies as they have to bear twice the cost of freight on majority of those returned orders,” he said.

Snapdeal said it delivered only 40% of its usual orders on Monday, while Flipkart and Amazon registered delayed deliveries, with some non-essentials such as TVs set to take almost a month to be delivered.

Flipkart has now stopped taking any orders till there is clarity from local authorities, sources in the know said. The Walmart-owned etailer is likely to restart its grocery delivery business across five cities over the next few days.

SoftBank-backed grocery etailer Grofers, which was operating only 20% of its warehouses, saw 20,000 of its deliveries being delayed in Faridabad area.

The company expects 60% of its facilities to reopen in the coming days as local authorities in some states swung into action late on Tuesday.

Offline large-format retailer DMart, too, has stopped accepting online orders.

Food delivery app Swiggy shut its premium service Scootsy and its micro delivery service SuprDaily in Mumbai temporarily. Even regular operations of food delivery apps have been affected in several locations.

Zomato said its delivery partners were facing issues across cities while trying to deliver food even though it is an essential service.

“These are unprecedented times… We request law enforcement to please allow our delivery personnel to do their jobs,” a Zomato spokesperson said.

Online pharmacies reported that supply of medicines was not yet under pressure as they largely work with local chemists to pick up orders.

However, their logistics staff faced issues from local police.

“While the government has assured us that essential services will be supported, it’s unfortunate to see such issues,” said Prashant Tandon, founder of online pharmacy 1MG.

While logistics has been hit, sellers on e-commerce marketplaces have also shuttered businesses. “Business is down, but we also fear for our lives and the lives of our employees,” said a seller affiliated to the All Indian Online Vendors’ Association, a group that represents online vendors. “We will come back only after March 31 as per the government order.”