With the festive season sale merely a few days away, both e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart are geared up for their respective Great Indian Festival sale and The Big Billion Days sale, starting on October 10.
Walmart-owned Flipkart has hired 30,000 people to strengthen its supply chain and logistics operations, in anticipation for the surge in sales during the festive season, over the last few months.
Flipkart further expects its sellers to have created over five lakh indirect jobs at their locations.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of Flipkart, said, “Along with ensuring that our customers have a seamless shopping experience, we want the economy to benefit from the increased activity. By generating employment and enabling our sellers to scale their businesses during this time, we’re playing an important role in driving the industry and subsequently the economy.”
Flipkart will also leverage its network of flexible infrastructure, that has been built to cater to the unexpected record demand from customers. It has a strong network of 16 flex fulfilment centres, along with 15 mother hubs to its supply chain infrastructure.
Its US-based rival Amazon has hired around 50,000 temporary workers for picking, packing, and delivering orders in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, and Pune.
Amazon is equipped with a network of over 50 fulfilment centres, multiple sortation centres and around 150 delivery stations across the country.
These season recruitments will help the e-tailers to efficiently handle the high volumes during the festive season sale. According to a report by RedSeer, a research firm, around 20 million people are expected to shop across various e-commerce platform, translating into sales of around $3 billion.
Apart from the two e-commerce giants, Snapdeal is also starting its festive season sale called “Mega Diwali Sale” on October 10.
With three e-commerce players set to battle against each other for a larger share in the growing e-commerce market, it is to be seen, who emerges victorious with the bigger piece of the Indian e-commerce pie during the festive season sale.