ClickPosts’ study suggests the virus has made e-com industry both tech-driven & humane
ClickPost, India’s largest logistics intelligence platform, has released a report that translates the changes that have occurred at the e-commerce businesses’ end to maintain supply while taking care of their resources and costs. The result is based on the 8Mn+ shipment data available with ClickPost and survey done amongst its 100+ e-commerce clients and delivery partners.
Human Resources:
As a result of the coronavirus pandemic more and more employees are urged to work from home. To enable a smoother work from home experience 5 types of software are being used by e-commerce companies – Slack and Microsoft teams for team collaboration, Symantec and Forticlient for endpoint protection, Tick and Clockify to track time of the employees, Google Drive for cloud collaboration and finally, Zoom and Hangout for video conferencing.
Businesses have also invested in online training, which is up to 67% cheaper than classroom training. Introductory tech skills for non-tech staff, functional training and soft skills training have been the star courses during this period. Furthermore, assuming that the work-from-home percentage would inevitably increase just like the West, e-commerce companies are preparing for it by having appropriate governance & KPIs in place.
Marketing:
The sudden increase in people being indoors has led to a change in lifestyle where customers have shifted to spending more time online than before. This, coupled with decreasing marketing budgets, has led to a decrease in CPM costs by up to 20%. To counter this, marketers have started exploring alternative marketing gambits, the most common being “content marketing”. There has been an increase in the focus on building interest-specific niche communities and on direct communication with customers over emails, newsletters, webinars & blogs. The theme of the content has majorly been the human aspect of their company through discussion on the daily lives of employees, business challenges & social contributions. Whatsapp and Facebook have continued to be the top social media apps in India.
Supply Chain:
Companies are working more closely with their suppliers. To ensure availability and safety of inventory, e-commerce companies are developing a few local suppliers, informing them of safety practices and maintaining active communication. Companies are also rapidly onboarding new courier partners, including regional players, to keep serviceability high. More and more companies are adopting machine-learning driven supply-chain delay prediction engines to counter the unpredictability in the supply chain.
Delivery partners are implementing a check during product dispatch from the warehouse to ensure products which have to be sent to no-delivery areas are not picked up. On the returns’ end, companies are increasing the return period for old orders and handling returns in a separate section of the warehouse to avoid a higher risk of infection coming from customers.
Commenting on the report, Pranshu Kacholia, VP-Business, ClickPost said, “Technology adoption in logistics has increased manifold in the e-commerce industry in the past few months. Advanced machine learning algorithms which were earlier used largely by companies processing 100k+ monthly orders are finding huge applications for smaller e-commerce companies as well. Supply-chain exceptions are expected to remain high in the next 1 year, and e-commerce companies are rapidly onboarding technologies which can help automate the resolution of these exceptions so that unit economics is not impacted much.”
ClickPost is India’s largest and Asia’s second-largest integrated logistics platform with more than 100 logistics partners integrated via a single REST API. Its plug and play SaaS platform puts intelligence in every delivery and has enabled its clients including Nykaa, Realme and Pharmeasy reduce RTO rates, prevent delays, cut down logistics and customer care costs and provide best after purchase experience.
