Amazon has become the second large Indian ecommerce store to stop delivering high value orders to customers who are ordering from Uttar Pradesh postal codes. Last year Flipkart has done the same.
Amazon India will not be delivering anything that is priced over Rs. 5000 to postal codes from cities like Noida or Ghaziabad. Flipkart’s limit for UP is Rs. 10,000. But looks like Amazon wants to cut the risk further and hence a lower limit.
Amazon has not officially announced this change, however, we tried ordering an item priced over Rs. 10,000 on a Ghaziabad postal code, and here is the message that Amazon gave us.
The error message was, “Sorry, this item can’t be shipped to your selected address. Learn more. You may either change the shipping address or delete the item from your order. ”
Interestingly, if you see the learn more section for this error message, Amazon says it could be due to following reasons:
- None of our courier services deliver to your area.
- The category of the item you ordered is not delivered by the courier service that delivers in your area.
So, while Amazon is not explicitly telling customers that these postal codes are not allowed for high value items, they are just giving the standard reasons.
When we tried to order a low priced item, sure enough, we were able to place the order. See the screenshot for the order worth Rs. 2400.
This clearly is an indicator that Amazon stopped delivering high value products to UP postal codes.
Why has Amazon done this?
Most ecommerce sites do not trust UP customers – the reason being that high volume of items from UP customers get cancelled or they decline to accept them on delivery after they have ordered expensive items on ‘Cash on Delivery’. Cases of fraud which involve use of stolen or lost credit cards have also been registered.
Cancellations and non-acceptance of CoD items take up lot of resources of eCommerce sites and transportation costs of high value products is higher and incur much higher losses if cancelled. Local and State taxes are again borne by the company. Overall, it severely affects the bottom-line and hence companies like Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal have stopped delivering the products to UP.
Unfortunately, the worst part is genuine buyers also get affected due to this limit.
What is your take on such a limit by Amazon?