Snapdeal, India’s leading value-focused e-commerce marketplace, expanded its nationwide logistics network by opening 8 new centres at manufacturing hubs located across cities in India.
The expansion is part of a decentralized network designed by Snapdeal, where its centres are located within commercial hubs inside a city to ensure faster pickup of packets from the sellers. This has become all the more important due to COVID-19 related restrictions, which at times reduce the operating hours or prohibit weekend operations in some parts of the country.
The new centres are located inside the manufacturing hubs at Bahadurgarh, Rajkot, Bhiwandi, Agra, Yamuna Nagar, Noida, Mathura and Mumbai.
The new centres are part of a pre-Diwali increase in capacity to cater to the festive spike in volumes. These new centres will cater to manufacturers and sellers of decor and furnishing items like lights, curtains, bedsheets, kitchenware and apparel including sarees and ethnic wear. All these items are expected to witness high festive sales volumes due to an increase in the number of Indians preferring to buy online for convenience and safety reasons.
Earlier this year, Snapdeal opened 15 logistics centres. With the new addition, the company now runs 23 logistics centres. Snapdeal’s logistics hubs offer dedicated facilities for the manufacturing units, including packaging of orders and online tracking for orders in transit and facilitate faster movement of packets.
According to a Snapdeal Spokesperson, “The additional logistics capacity comes ahead of the festive season sale when the volume of orders is higher. The new centres make the fulfillment process simpler for the manufacturer-sellers so that they can devote all their resources towards production.”
The new centres cater to the growing shipment volumes from manufacturers who are opting to sell directly on Snapdeal, bypassing or supplementing the traditional structure of selling through wholesalers and retailers.
With Indian e-commerce now growing beyond the first 100 million urban users, a market of potentially 400 million new users is emerging across India’s Tier 2 and 3 cities and bulk of these users are looking for value-priced merchandise. This has caught the attention of manufacturers who specialize in the value-priced segment and who see Snapdeal as the best fit for their merchandise and clientele. There has been a steady increase in sellers on Snapdeal who manufacture their own products.
In 2020, Snapdeal is aiming to add 5,000 manufacturer-sellers on its platform this year. Most of these manufacturers produce and sell daily use products like steel & copper utensils, kitchen gadgets like food processors and fashion accessories like watches & wallets.
Snapdeal has more than 500,000 + registered sellers who together offer more than 220 Mn+ product listings. 75,000 value-focused sellers joined in the last 18 months, with nearly 10,000 sellers joining during the pandemic period to expand their market reach. 85 percent of Snapdeal’s users are from non-metro cities, where e-commerce plays a more crucial role due to the constraints in the offline supply chains
Snapdeal services over 26,000 pin codes across India, which includes all the metros, Tier 1 & 2 cities, and most of Tier 3 and 4 towns of India.
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