The e-commerce battle is getting fierce day by day. New deals are signed, some are forgone, new friends are made and new rivals surface!
Just a few days back Amazon formed a strategic alliance with the Future Group, Flipkart is still recovering from the Bigbillion Flop sale with show cause notices and now it’s Snapdeal’s turn to be in news!
The market is aloft with news that Snapdeal is planning to raise 650 million dollars by the end of this year. The present year saw Flipkart raise $1 billion in July followed by Bezos confirming to invest twice as much as Flipkart’s and looks like Tata backed Snapdeal doesn’t wish to be left behind. With Japan’s Softbank being the biggest investor, including others such as eBay Inc, Temasek Holdings Pvt Ltd and Ratan Tata having stake in Kunal Bahl led Snapdeal, it is sure to exceed to it’s expectations from the capital market.
This independence day, PM Modi emphasized on the importance of public and private sector synchronization for the welfare of public and two months hence we have our first duly signed MoU (Memorandum of Understanding)! This Delhi based company has finally finalized a MoU with the India Post for faster and reliable delivery. Known for it’s wider reach where private courier services refuse to go, India Post is the world’s largest postal service network.
John Samuel, member of Postal Services Board said, “India Post is ready to tap into the opportunities arising out of e-commerce as the decade’s old postal department has the manpower to deliver the goods even to the last corner of the country. Our delivery system is based on pin code system with 100 per cent accuracy, while courier services active in the country are limited to certain pockets only.’
As of now, Snapdeal and Shopclues has embraced India Post to help them give an “on-time-delivery” of goods to any nook and corner in the country. Though there are 1.50 lakh post offices with a huge workforce, India Post’s lethargic logistics was private logistic provider’s gain. But Samuel seems optimistic of fixing the damaged image of India Post by working with the biggies of the e-commerce space. Taking a dig at the Chinese postal services, he mentioned, “Most of the logistics part of Chinese e-commerce major Alibaba is being handled by the Chinese Postal department. India Post can also act as the largest logistics partner for e-tail majors in the coming days.”
On occasion of business development day on Oct 14th, India Post initiated the move and seems to be happy with the results. Snapdeal had earlier tied up with India Post to offer stamps including stamp collections for philatelists priced between Rs. 300 –Rs. 5,500.
Last year, even Amazon was piloting the India Post’s COD options. Amazon still uses US post, the official postal service of the USA for deliveries in it’s home country. Cash on delivery accounts to almost 2/3rds of the total e-commerce transactions. So a good logistics and money recovery systems are the need of the hour.
With each person owing more than 2 Sims and easy access to emails, the major transformation in connectivity put India Post out of business for almost a decade now. Eyeing the recent e-changes, Raghuram Rajan, RBI Governor has given the India Post a green signal for a banking license which means that doing COD transactions with the E-commerce portals will be further easy. The long severed public image of the India Post will get it’s big break by tying up with the e-commerce giants.
In return to the services given to the e-commerce companies, India Post will and is “in the process of inducting new-age technology through an enterprise wide IT Project, at an approximate cost of Rs. 4909 crores, which will bring in electronic connectivity and capability across 1.5 lakhs Post Offices for seamless delivery of all mail & financial services.”
A reasonable deal and a great timing for India Post to emerge from it’s cocoon. We hope to see India Post surprise us!