India Post has launched an e-commerce centre in New Delhi to handle all the e-commerce delivery business. It will handle deliveries via India Post every day, from booking to dispatch, with conveyor belt able to handle up to 30,000 parcels every day.
E-commerce players already using the service
The parcels will be collected from India Post’s e-commerce customers, processed and dispatched within 24 hours to their destinations through the quickest available flight or train, the centre claims. India Post has customers in major e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Snapdeal, Paytm and Yepme amongst others, which are already using this service for delivery in Delhi. An ET report mentioned that telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad posted on Facebook: “I am happy to share with you that India Post collected Rs 500 crore from Cash on Delivery of eCommerce parcels alone in 2014-15.”
App for speed post tracking
The government has also launched an India post mobile app developed by the Centre for Excellence in Postal Technology (CEPT), Mysore. The app has features like real time parcel tracking (for a variety of parcels ranging from speed post, registered parcel to money order etc), PO search and postage calculator among others. We downloaded the app to check it out and on opening the app, sadly, it gave us this error:
Interestingly, the mGovernance Team has a variety of apps such as IRCTC insta-booking, HP gas booking, Aadhaar linking, PAN card tracker, Railway enquiry, Income tax refund, Delhi metro, H1B Visa status among others.
India Post’s previous initiatives:
– In April 2013, India Post launched a delivery service for e-retailers. Then, India Post was building 20 mechanised warehouses and booking centres to handle the shipments from e-commerce companies. At that time, Snapdeal was testing this service with India Post before its official launch.
– In February this year, India Post had planned to roll out its e-commerce portal in the next six months, as a part of its massive modernization initiative worth Rs 5,000 crore. It mentioned that India Post would not be a marketplace for goods but instead maintain a moderated and curated list of items.
– In the last financial year, India Post’s Karnataka Circle generated revenue worth Rs 50 crore on the back of e-commerce deliveries for Amazon, Snapdeal, Flipkart, Myntra, Homeshop18, and Global Shiksha among others.
– In October last year, India Post signed an MoU with Snapdeal.com & shopclues.com to offer their e-commerce business a wider reach and network. This MoU followed a pilot between Snapdeal and India Post for e-commerce deliveries in 2013.
