E-commerce firms boost postal department revenues

With e-commerce platforms increasingly turning to the Indian Posts to deliver their orders to customers, the fast flourishing e-retail business has become a revenue generator for the state-run agency, whose traditional operations are dented by the deep penetration of e-mail and mobile phones.

Realising the potential, the Postal Department has set up a dedicated e-commerce and parcel processing center in the country's commercial hub Mumbai.

Spread across 12,000 sq ft, the facility at Parel in the city has bagged good business in a short span, handling around 5,000 orders a day.

The department officials expect at this pace the traffic would soon increase to 10,000 parcels per day. The facility has a capacity to process 30,000 parcels per day.

Quite a few e-commerce companies have already approached the department seeking tie-up with India's oldest and most trusted National postal facility including major players like Amazon, Snapdeal, Flipkart, E-bey, Telebrand India, TVC network, Quick Services and Red Box.

"The commercial agreement started taking place last year and by now we have had commercial tie-up with 46 e-commerce companies in Mumbai region, 7 in Pune and 6 in Goa," said a senior official from the Postal Department.

"Since our Speed Post service is known as the most preferred and premium brand, these companies are taking our services to deliver their goods through us," said the officer.

"In the last financial year, we earned almost Rs 10 crore from delivering articles booked through E-commerce companies and for the current year, we have doubled our target," he said adding that department has full right to check and intercept the articles for the examining purposes.

Apart from electronic items such as mobile handsets and a variety of gadgets a host of other items like apparels, consumables goods, perfumes, intimation jewellery and a wide range of various other products booked through e-commerce platform are delivered by post.

Rajiv Singal, trustee of Bharat Merchant Chamber and an expert in postal issues, said, "E-commerce companies have provided a opportunity to revive the business of postal department and the department of post should commercially exploit it with full capacity."