After launching in-a-day delivery service in December last year, Flipkart has now introduced same day guarantee delivery in 10 cities across India.
To avail this feature, users will have to place their orders by 12 noon and ship it to an address in Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Noida, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Manesar, Navi Mumbai and Thane. Flipkart claims that the order will be delivered by 9pm on the same day. For this, the company will be charging an additional shipping fee of Rs 200, which has currently been reduced to an introductory pricing of Rs 140.
In addition, Flipkart mentions that it will refund the product value (of up to Rs 5,000) back to the user’s wallet if the product is not delivered on the same day, in addition to the compensation to the customer. However, note that this offer is valid only for the next three days (April 28-30), following which it will be offering only compensation to the customer, similar to In-a-Day Guarantee.
This service is however currently available for products sold by WS Retail, which handles its front end retail operations although a company spokesperson told Medianama that they will eventually open it up for other merchants as well.
How are they managing this?
Ravi Vora, Senior VP – Marketing at Flipkart told Medianama that this service has been in the works for some time now, since it requires co-ordination between the company’s technology team, operations team, logistics & warehousing team, its logistic partners and also its customer platform. He claims that they are currently covering 50% of the e-commerce audience through these 10 cities and claims to be the only e-commerce platform in the country offering this service at such a scale in the country.
Vora mentions that they have created a separate system for same day delivery in supply chain which essentially works like parallel track to the standard delivery option but with lesser lead time and priority for packing, shipping and delivery. Going forward, they plan to extend this service to other cities across the country based on the response they get and ironing out any issues in the system.
It’s worth noting that this service is not available for the recently launched large appliances category since that has a different supply chain system altogether. The company had re-entered the large appliances category earlier this month by launching televisions, after pulling out from the category last June.
One Day Delivery accounts for 5%-10% of orders
In addition to same day delivery, Flipkart has also extended its one day delivery service to 27 cities across India and is apparently delivering to select locations on Sundays through this option. Vora mentions that this delivery option accounted for 4%-5% of the company’s orders initially and is currently at 5%-10% depending on the category. In some high-value categories, one day delivery represents around 35%-40% of the company’s total orders.
Flipkart Try & Buy
The e-commerce major is also piloting a try & buy service for select fashion categories like Women’s jeans, Men’s jeans, trousers and casual shirts in select locations in Bangalore. Users can select their preferred product and alternatives from the list and place the order over the phone. Following this, a Flipkart executive will bring the product along with the alternatives for users to try and buy it.
Users can currently order a maximum of three variants of a product. They will be provided a maximum of 20 minutes to try the products and confirm or cancel the order. One can pay by either cash, credit card or debit card.
Note that Flipkart’s competitors Yebhi and Zovi have also previously experimented with the try and buy model, while Myntra which is reportedly in merger talks with Flipkart, had launched a similar experiment in November 2012 and also acquired San Francisco based virtual fitting room startup Fitiquette in April last year.
In-Store Pick up?
When asked whether Flipkart is also planning in-store pick-up services like its competitor Amazon India, Vora mentioned they are currently evaluating multiple such initiatives but declined to share any specific information.
Also read: How Myntra Managed One Hour Delivery For Some E-commerce Purchases