Flipkart strengthens its Kirana Delivery Program; Onboards two lakh kiranas as delivery partners ahead of the festive Season
- To deliver millions of Flipkart shipments this festive season across the country
- To help boost Kiranas’ income during the upcoming festive time
- Kiranas are trained in supply chain deliveries including digital skills and customer management
Flipkart’s Kirana delivery program has seen massive acceptance across the country and more and more Kirana stores are expressing interest to join. As preparations for the festive season scale up, states including West Bengal (27,000 ), Bihar (23,000 ), Uttar Pradesh (20,000 ), Maharashtra (17,000 ) and Tamil Nadu (14,000 ) have witnessed the highest onboarding of kiranas while other states including Puducherry and Jammu & Kashmir too have seen increased onboarding by Kirana partners. Similarly, the Northeastern states have witnessed a significant jump in participation with nearly 15,000 partner stores across Tripura, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh coming onboard – a significant 5X growth from 2020.
This year, Flipkart has introduced additional incentives for kirana partners such as guaranteed payment & bonuses, referral incentives and a host of other benefits including personal accident policy of Rs 5 lakhs, which has been encouraging kirana partners across India to join hands with the company.
Hemant Badri, Senior Vice-President, Supply Chain at the Flipkart Group, said, “As a homegrown e-commerce marketplace, Flipkart is committed to creating a shared value for all ecosystem partners and has rolled out various initiatives over the years to further assimilate them into our value chain. In this endeavour, our Kirana Delivery Program has been one of the most impactful initiatives with over 2 lakh kirana partners joining hands with Flipkart. This program will enable us to seamlessly fulfill customers’ evolving requirements during the upcoming annual festive extravaganza, the Big Billion Days, with further expansion of the program across the nook and corner of the country. We are also committed to bringing prosperity for our kirana partners and their commitment towards the program has further enabled us to expand our delivery offerings to multiple products including high value items such as mobile phones, electronics and others.”
The festive season and the Big Billion Days play an important role in scaling the entire ecosystem. The kirana partners get an opportunity to augment their income and earn significantly higher with increased shipment deliveries across the country. Flipkart’s Kirana Delivery programme is growing strength to strength and today, of the 100 million deliveries a month, Kiranas deliver over 30% of these shipments across the country. This is equally attracting thousands of women, most of these from smaller cities, to be part of the program and is enabling them to fund their studies, manage personal priorities and make the best use of their time while earning a livelihood.
Launched in 2019, Flipkart’s Kirana Delivery Program helps onboards local general trade stores, or kiranas, as delivery partners based on their availability, storage space at the store and willingness to have an additional source of income. Having started with 27,000 kirana partners in the first year, the program has been witnessing consistent support from India’s oldest form of retail and has been doubling its onboarding count year-on-year - 50,000 partners in 2020 to 1 lakh in 2021 and over 2 lakh this year.
The company has also established a digital registration process to ensure faster onboarding of interested kirana partners. The process entails submitting an online application along with necessary documents and after thorough verification, the selected kiranas are inducted into the program and trained in the various nuances of delivery and customer management, in addition to use of the app-based dashboards and digital payments. This helps in ensuring safe, timely deliveries and consistently superior e-commerce experiences.