After much testing in the U.S. for delivering packages to its customers via bicycles, Amazon, the most visited e-commerce website in India has finally launched bike deliveries in the country. The service is already live in Manhattan since the last February and promises to deliver couriers within just 1 hour.
This project was started in Mumbai last month and is currently in testing phase in 5 cities namely Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, and Chennai. The company also plans to extend it to other major cities in near future.
Besides aiming to cut down delivery cost and time, this initiative will also help the company go green with its deliveries while generating more employment opportunities in the process.
“Being conscious of the environment we live in, reducing carbon footprint is the need of the hour. We have taken this ecofriendly step by introducing bicycle deliveries, which also helps delivery associates with easier access in congested metro cities,” said Samuel Thomas, Director Transportation, Amazon India.
Dynamics of Deliveries Using Bicycle
As per the plan, Amazon’s Bicycle courier guys would carry packages up to 7.5 kg per trip and earn about Rs. 7,000 to Rs. 8,500 per month. This is close to half of what Amazon India pays to deliveries boys on motor bikes.
Amazon also believes that making deliveries using would help them cut down on delivery time by a lot, since it is easier to slip through heavy traffic on a bicycle than on a motorbike.
Is This The Need Of The Hour?
According to a report by PwC, online retail is the being adopted by a lot of Indian shoppers and this number is expected to reach 3% by the year 2020. Also the orders per million are also expected to more than double to 12 million by 2016, than just 5 million in 2013.
This means the need to acquire more resources for the e-commerce and their logistics providers in order to deliver the shipments on time. So, they have to innovate in their delivery methods too because the problem of traffic jams is not going away any time soon.
Amazon is also trying to deliver products via drones, but as it involves taking a lot of legal permissions, air delivery will probably take some more time.
So, making deliveries via bicycles makes perfect sense at least for the foreseeable future unless drones becomes very safe and efficient to take on package delivery. What do you think?
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