Amazon plans to tap students, housewives to speed up deliveries

New Delhi: Amazon India is on its way to speed-up its deliveries during peak season by offering part-time employment to student, housewives and retired professionals.

Beside the proper item collection, quick and reliable delivery is the most important part of the e-commerce business.

Over a long time, Amazon India has presented a few ways of advertising conclusive and quicker deliveries, counting one-day, two-day and planned deliveries.

Prime offers guaranteed next-day delivery on certain items and Prime Now gives two-hour delivery for goods.

Presently, with Amazon Flex, as the activity is called, Amazon India looking forward to create job openings for thousands, giving them the chance to earn extra income during their free time.

The individual will work for four hours a day and can win Rs 120-140 an hour delivering packages. The “part time delivery partner" will be paid every Wednesday.

“While we continue to scale our existing delivery capabilities across the country, Amazon Flex will enable Amazon to continue growing our capacity to serve more customers and speed up deliveries," said Akhil Saxena, vice-president (Asia Customer Fulfilment) at Amazon.

The company ran a pilot project for two weeks before launching it in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi, with more cities planned to be included later this year.

In India, Amazon entered in 2013 and it offers nearly 170 million items from over 400,000 vendors. Last year, it boosted its infrastructure (fulfilment centres) by 1.5 times in capacity volume to more than 20 million cubic feet over that of 2017.

Since 2013, Amazon has invested nearly USD 5 billion in India, mostly on innovation, infrastructure and technology.

India is the seventh country where Amazon has launched Amazon Flex. It has been operational in North America, Germany, Spain, Japan, Singapore and the UK, where it grew delivery capacity and sped up deliveries for customers.

“There is a stickiness that comes with faster, reliable deliveries. It’s not important that it comes in 1-2 hours (barring groceries and medicines)," said Devangshu Dutta, chief executive of retail consultancy Third Eyesight. “The competition here is (with) malls and shops that give instant gratification. Hence, the earlier the product comes, the better it is. It takes away the desire to check out alternatives."