Logistics in Indian e-commerce space last mile delivery challenges and solutions

Abstract

Rapid growth in e-commerce has resulted in various new business models and strategies in customer engagement and in addressing gaps in the traditional value chain, particularly in logistical support. Logistics has gained strategic importance both as a cost driver and as a service enabler. Though this has been clearly identified by all e-commerce players, how to adapt the logistics strategy to all the possible challenges is still not clear. The crucial challenge is to match the fulfilment to the needs of each unique environment it has to serve. In choosing the strategies or models, the trade-off between saving time & cost and matching the service levels and fulfillment expectations of customer should be considered. External factors such as infrastructure, access, skills, market and technology readiness compound the landscape also influence the logistics. In this paper, we attempt to identify the Indian context specific as well as business strategy specific challenges in last mile delivery in the Indian e-commerce space. The main objective is to analyze the identified challenges in order to recommend solutions that effectively and economically address the challenges. In order to accomplish this task, the combination of primary research and literature & multiple case-study review approach was used. This paper is organized in # sections. Section 1 is Industry overview of e-commerce and logistics. Section 2 and 3 present our research objective and methodology. Section 4 consists of literature review on papers and reports written on this subject. Section 5 presents our findings from secondary research. Section 6 contains analysis of various logistics challenges faced and provides solutions with analysis of a number of cases in Indian as well as global scenario.