Amazon readies for festive season with seven new fulfilment centres

With the festive season around the corner, e-commerce sites are already flooded with orders placed by shoppers. In order to help sellers address this sudden spurt in orders, Amazon India has invested in seven new warehouses or fulfilment centres.
The company, which now has 20 warehouses, has opened the new centres in Ahmedabad, Delhi, Kolkata, Nagpur, Gurgaon, Pune and Mumbai.
Amazon Fulfilment Centres are warehouses where online retailers who use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) services, stock their inventory. When using FBA, sellers across India send their products to Amazon’s fulfilment centres and once an order is placed, Amazon picks, packs and ships the order to the customer, provides customer service and manages returns on behalf of the sellers. Orders fulfilled by Amazon are eligible for Cash on Delivery, Guaranteed Next-Day, Same Day, Release Day and Sunday delivery.
“This investment in fulfilment infrastructure before the upcoming festive season will enable thousands of sellers to take advantage of Amazon’s FBA services and grow exponentially during the country’s biggest shopping season,” said Akhil Saxena, Director,  Operations, Amazon India.
Amazon claims that its sellers have been witnessing exponential growth with overall volume growth exceeding 500% in the latest quarter largely powered by this FBA services.
Logistics and timely deliveries remain the major challenge for e-commerce firms during the festive season rush where majority of people let loose their purse strings on shopping.
Where Amazon has strengthened its fulfilment centre capabilities, Delhivery a third-party logistics provider to e-commerce firms, has come up with an effective solution to solve the problem of delayed deliveries.
“Last minute orders, climatic conditions, traffic can be a few reasons for delays in deliveries, which is why we are working on network optimisation,” Santanu Bhattacharya, senior vice-president of tech and product, Delhivery, told Indiaretailing.
“To make a delivery on time we compute the last-mile dispatch problems with real-time data requirements such as traffic updates, weather updates and shipment checks. With planned deliveries backed up by strong data analysis we can achieve the target in a given span of time,” Bhattacharya adds.
Last Diwali, e-commerce space took off really very well with small as well big e-commerce players saw tremendous increase in sales and traffic, and if media reports are to be believed the coming festive season is expected to witness the e-commerce sales to the tune of Rs 25,600 crore.