To further boost its network capabilities to cater to the festive spike in volumes, Snapdeal has opened eight new logistics centres across manufacturing hubs located in five cities of India.
The new centres are located inside the manufacturing hubs at Bahadurgarh, Yamuna Nagar (Haryana), Rajkot (Gujarat), Bhiwandi (Maharashtra), Agra, Noida, Mathura (Uttar Pradesh) and Mumbai.
The expansion is part of a decentralised network designed by Snapdeal, where its centres are located within commercial hubs inside a city to ensure faster pickup of packets from the sellers, Snapdeal said in a statement.
The e-tailer said the new centres are part of a pre-Diwali increase in capacity to cater to the festive spike in volumes.
Earlier this year, Snapdeal had opened 15 logistics centres. With the new additions, the company now runs 23 logistics centres that offer dedicated facilities for manufacturing units, including packaging and online tracking of orders in transit, facilitating faster movement of packets.
With Indian e-commerce now growing beyond the first 100 million urban users, a market of potentially 400 million new users is emerging across India’s tier II and III cities and bulk of these users are looking for value-priced merchandise. This has caught the attention of manufacturers who specialise in the value-priced segment and who see Snapdeal as the best fit for their merchandise and clientele. There has been a steady increase in sellers on Snapdeal who manufacture their own products.
The new centres cater to the growing shipment volumes from manufacturers who are opting to sell directly on Snapdeal, bypassing or supplementing the traditional structure of selling through wholesalers and retailers, the company said.
In 2020, Snapdeal is aiming to add 5000 manufacturer-sellers on its platform this year. Most of these manufacturers produce and sell daily use products.
At present, the online marketplace has more than 5 lakh registered sellers with over 220 million million product listings. 75,000 sellers joined the platform in the last 18 months, with nearly 10,000 during the pandemic period. About 85 per cent of Snapdeal’s users are from non-metro cities.
