The Indian e-commerce market is
expected
to reach $200 billion by 2026. The rapid digitisation and internet penetration in the country has enabled an enormous push for e-commerce this past decade. The pandemic has only added to the growth. As a result, businesses that previously only had a seller page in giant e-commerce marketplaces or a social media page for visibility have started setting up their e-commerce channels.
Typically, they set up storefronts on one of the top e-commerce tools such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart etc. Each of these platforms offer a wide range of services, including product listing, promotions, payment integration, inventory management etc., making the customer experience seamless.
However, for most small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the digitisation ends there. Once the order is placed, the fulfilment and logistics processes that follow are performed manually offline across various disparate systems. Here’s how one of our SMEs was doing their fulfilment before they came onboard gtv电竞世界dota .
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Customer places an order on the website
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Order triggers an email to a sales executive, who updates a spreadsheet of orders
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The logistics team looks at the spreadsheet to verify the availability of inventory
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Packaging executive packs, labels and get the order ready for shipping
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Delivery executive takes the packages to a local courier partner, who issues a slip for each parcel
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The delivery executive returns and updates another spreadsheet with the airway bill number
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The customer service executive refers to this spreadsheet to track the package when the customer enquires
As you can see, while the sales process was entirely digitised and automated, the backed is highly manual and inefficient. This is because no traditional courier service offers integration with e-commerce platforms. Because traditional courier service is not built of e-commerce.
If you are taking your business online, you need shipping and logistics that is designed for e-commerce. Here’s what that would look like.