India's Great Parcel Race

India's Great Parcel Race(graphics.wsj.com)

53 points by anishkothari 10 years ago | 18 comments

jestinjoy1 10 years ago |

e-commerce changed the way people buy things here in remote places in India. They could buy things that was not even in their dreams few years back. E-commerce advertisements cover most front pages of newspapers now. More startups are coming up in logistics space. Amazon, Alibaba etc has started investing here seeing the market potential. Logistics here is a big problem. Since local sellers are feeling the heat, they are doing everything they can to stop e-commerce players.

bruceb 10 years ago | |

While there is improvement some local sellers can do they also are not getting a fair fight. E commerce giants are funded by massive amounts of VC money and selling products are unsustainable prices. That has lessened now but it is hard to compete if your competitor doesn't have to make money for a while.

hackuser 10 years ago | |

How will this impact people? Many of those local sellers already are very poor. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that families are starving as a consequence. For example, thousands of farmers in India are committing suicide per year, apparently due to economic conditions.

sremani 10 years ago | | |

The suicide by drinking pesticides were happening for a long time, especially since mid-90s. The rate of increase has more to do with public policy , price controls and sub-par pesticides, fertilizers and seeds. The cock-tail of GATT, WTO restriction on farmer subsidies coupled with price controls and adulterated products, has created the farmer suicide hell.

ECommerce and logistics have nothing to do with it.

hvmonk 10 years ago |

tldr: Distance: 1,865.9 km Delivery Cost: 45 rupees ($0.70) Modes of transport: Three Time in transit: 32 hours 25 minutes Total time: Two days, 19 hours, 6 minutes

That's pretty good.

johansch 10 years ago | |

I'd say it's pretty sad.

johansch 10 years ago |

"India's per capita income (nominal) was $ 1570 in 2013."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_India

So like 30-50 times less than a "western" country. :/

sremani 10 years ago | |

India is a very divided country. So, if you are catering to top 10% of the population you are already in the ball-park of 100 million people, that pretty much beats out every Western country except USA. The number in middle class is about 400million, that is the number to focus at least for immediate future. The rest of 800 million, well, God Bless them!

johansch 10 years ago | | |

... because India won't take care of them?

shripadk 10 years ago | | |

It's not hard to get them out of poverty. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVjZjPbHrFE

late2part 10 years ago | |

true - but the curve is not what you'd expect. Apartments in Bangalore cost half of what they do in San Jose.

bandrami 10 years ago | |

That's nominal; it's much higher by PPP. (Still much lower than the global West and North, of course.)

avinassh 10 years ago |

I am very to surprised to see article talking about Shopclues, which is notoriously famous for sending counterfiet items instead of genuine. You could buy pirated Windows or Xbox/PS game DVDs from that site.

bandrami 10 years ago |

The lack of a consistent address system in India is definitely a challenge for a lot of provisioning (my address includes the phrase "Lot where the Cotton Mill was").