The deliveries are primarily directed at tier-II towns, and parts of the rural heartland, where India Post has unparalleled reach.
India
Post is cashing in on the boom in e-commerce deliveries, especially the surging
cash-on-delivery consignments of the country’s top online sellers — Amazon,
Snapdeal and Flipkart-Myntra.
The
postal department’s revenues by ways of COD consignments from e-commerce majors
have surged to Rs 1,300 crore during the year ending March 2016, up from Rs 500
crore during the whole of 2014-15, and just Rs 100 crore in 2013-14. The
deliveries are primarily directed at tier-II towns, and parts of the rural
heartland, where India Post has unparalleled reach.
The
incremental e-commerce revenue boost, said Minister for Communications and
Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad, are proving to be a big boost for
the postal department. “The postal department collected Rs 1,300 crore in COD
collections during 2015-16, compared with Rs 100 crore in 2013-14,” Prasad told The Indian Express.
However,
according to India Post documents, it had expected the remittances from COD to
exceed Rs 1,500 crore during 2015-16.
The
postal department has tied-up with more than 400 e-commerce companies including
Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, YepMe, Shopclues for delivering e-commerce pre-paid
as well as COD orders. According to India Post, Jeff Bezos-led Amazon is India
Post’s largest business partner in e-commerce.
As
of December 2015, average monthly consignments from the department’s top six
e-commerce customers was up over six-fold, primarily on account of a big surge
in Amazon’s deliveries, which had sharply jumped to 3 lakh consignments until
December 2015 from an average of 50,000 in 2014-15.
Average
numbers of consignments from Snapdeal had reached 80,000 until December 2015,
as against 35,000 in 2014-15. Flipkart-Myntra have clocked average
consignment numbers of about 80,000 so far this year.
Prasad
had earlier told The Indian Express that the incremental e-commerce revenue
boost, was at the heart of his plans to revive the fortunes of India’s postal
service.
Source
: http://indianexpress.com/
