After getting acquired Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce player, has got a bigger war chest to compete with the world’s largest e-commerce giant Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in India. The company is making sure that it leaves no stones unturned in proving its mettle to the Indian audience. Among all the strategies, Flipkart Big Billion Days sale, which hosted every year, needs no introduction.
This year’s Flipkart Big Billion Days sale is expected to go live in October, and the Indian e-com giant is all set to tackle heavy traffic and a massive amount of orders during the sale. For the same, it has planned to enhance its delivery services three times, besides increasing its current warehousing workforce to 1,00,000. Flipkart is also working on expanding its storage capacity on a temporary basis.
As reported by an Economic Times, Flipkart is also in hiring spree owing to its intention of tripling its sales to approximately $17.6 billion by the year 2021. Flipkart, which currently holds the title of India’s largest online marketplace – is determined to maintain its lead against its competitors – Amazon India and Alibaba backed Paytm Mall.
Flipkart Big Billion Days Sale Triggers Massive Hiring
Flipkart Big Billion Days sale is a huge opportunity for the company to garner the total sales for a month within a period of mere five days. The e-commerce giant is well aware of the significance of the BBD sale, hence it has already started recruiting workforce, to give them a rigorous training of 30-40 days to make them achieve an operational efficiency level.
India’s largest online marketplace has really high expectations from this sale. According to the sources, this year, Flipkart Big Billion Days sale expected to be 80% higher than last year’s sale, with respect to gross merchandise value (GMV) and the number of units sold. Looking into previous years’ statistics, the poster boy of the Indian e-commerce industry garnered an estimated amount of $1.5 billion in GMV (Gross Merchandise Worth) during its 2017 Big Billion Days Sale.
Flipkart Tieing Up Loose Ends
To manage the huge amount of orders, Flipkart indirectly hires around 30,000 to 35,000 “Wishmasters”, who basically are delivery and warehouse executives. This year, this company has intended on hiring the largest workforce – taking into consideration that it is anticipating the sales to be the highest during the sales this year. Flipkart has always made its intentions of expanding its roots quite clear, with announcing in March of building a logistics park at a 100-acre plot.
Currently, Bansal’s company has around 34-35 warehouses, while Bezos’s Amazon India has 41 – going by the industry estimates. If we convert these figures into the total storage capacity of each company, Amazon has approximately 3 million square ft of storage capacity, while Flipkart has around 2.2 million square ft. of the same. However, during the sales period (festive seasons, EOSS sales, company’s sales) this storage capacity rises by more than 20%, through partnerships with smaller warehouses and other tie-ups.
The experts have confirmed that the e-commerce firms have already begun with their recruitment of the delivery personnel for the sales of the festive season. According to HR consulting firm TeamLease, almost 26,000 delivery workforces (including sales executives and promoters) were hired during the peak season last year, which spans from August through December. This year, they estimate this number to jump to at least 43,000, not including warehouse workers. Not only this provides a helping hand to the companies, but it also provides employment to a lot of people, who fetch decent salaries for their services. The expected salary for delivery agents is Rs.24,000-28,000 this year, rising from last year’s Rs. 20,000-22,000.
