ClickPost, India's leading logistics intelligence platform, held an online conference where senior leaders of some of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies participated. Participants included Tanvi Malik, Co-Founder Faballey, Ritesh Agarwal, Sr. Director Hopscotch, Gaurav Tejvani, VP-Product Nykaa and Ankit Gupta, Head-E-Commerce Bestseller and discussed the short to medium term impact of COVID-19 and the best practices to be followed.

In one of the largest live polls of senior e-commerce industry professionals done in the COVID period by ClickPost, 76% of professionals said that % of Cash-on-delivery orders will go down post-COVID. This indicates a positive fundamental change in Indian e-commerce that the industry has been struggling with for a long time.

About 81% of respondents said that e-commerce as a % of retail in India will increase by 50% (from 5% to more than 9%), driven by both increases in e-commerce sales & a decrease in offline sales.

Customer sentiment & Marketing

In the medium-term consumers will spend majorly on necessities and discretionary categories such as Fashion, Travel, and Hospitality etc. will take a big hit.  Brands should focus primarily on moving the huge inventory they currently hold E-commerce will probably be the 1st distribution channel to recover as people will not be comfortable in crowded space in the medium term.

Supply chain and fulfillment

With severe restrictions on inter-state movements, stores are becoming mini-warehouses and this increase in omnichannel adoption will continue in the long run.  Companies will no longer block inventories for any specific channel and are ensuring that the warehouse workforce feels secure & comfortable - increased adoption of automation tool, increasing Time gaps between shifts to enable frequent warehouse sanitization and more frequent changing of air in the warehouse for employee safety. With lots of shipments stuck in supply-chain, maintaining the count of inventory is critical to avoid inventory losses. 

Strategy & internal operations 

With huge uncertainty in global funding, ecosystem B2C brands should have minimum of 15-18 months cash runway. Positive collaboration between companies in offline & online space is happening to ensure delivery of essentials this collaboration will stay in the long run and bring down delivery costs.

Pranshu Kacholia, Vice President (Business), Clickpost said that "Post the lockdown opens, it'll take about a week to fulfill already ordered goods, post which the stuck shipment % should be around 5-6%, as opposed to <1% currently. This would depend a lot on the extent of partial lockdown.  We have already started to see that the courier serviceability of essential goods was around 35% on 31st March and increased to 58% on 6th April, so there is a clear trend indicating things stabilizing from the logistics front.