Ecommerce and Warehousing booming together in India

It is now an open secret that the ecommerce bandwagon is now moving at the speed of light and with the invasion of the smart phone culture is here to stay and grow stronger with each passing day. As the demands increase every day, the major e commerce giants are needing more and more of one thing which you cannot get anywhere online. They require space, no not server space but actual space to store stuff - lots of it and growing by the hour. They need big warehousing solutions and India is witnessing an unprecedented surge in this particular industry. As a matter of fact ecommerce majors Amazon and Flipkart have more than doubled their warehouse space as more and more sellers from every nook and corner of the country join the merry go round to claim their piece of fortune from the online shopping boom in India.

The numbers

A phenomenal statistic to consider and to be in awe of, is that the online ecommerce companies have in totality have actually leased around three and half million plus square feet of warehousing space in India and the major chunk of this size has been added in the last year where the e commerce eagles have soared very high indeed, at least in terms of the total business transaction numbers.

Akhil Saxena from Amazon India confirmed that their company has 21FCs across 10 states with a total of over 2 million-square-feet of space and this amounts to the biggest storage capacity and warehouse infrastructure that has been provided by any ecommerce entity for its partner sellers in the country today.

Ecommerce surging

Very recently around the fag end of the last year, Amazon India had increased 13 new FCs which literally doubled its storage capacity to nearly 5 million cubic feet. It’s biggest and the most gigantic warehouse is in Kothur, Mahbubnagar district which is spread over just a shade below 3 lac square feet.

Since there has been a massive increase in the number of transactions and high level of activity from the small and medium sized companies in India that are listed on amazon, there has been nearly a 250% yearly growth.

Naturally the infrastructure will have to keep pace with herculean number of deliveries, storage and relevant services. This infrastructure enhancement has enabled numerous vendors to sell to millions of buyers across India and that with efficient and smooth deliveries proving to be the icing on the cake.

The increase

Flipkart – the next online giant has taken its warehousing capacity upwards of the one and half million square feet mark by the last year end. Its biggest FC which is covers more than Two Lac square Feet having a mind boggling capacity of 589,000 cubic feet in terms of storage is in Gundla Pochampally, a location in location on the outskirt of Hyderabad.

The road ahead

It is no wonder that FlipKart which has more than Fifty million registered customers on its ecommerce platform plans to invest $300-500 million over the next five years to set up warehouses across India. It currently operates sixteen warehouses and plans to add 50-100 warehouses over the next four-five years. It has to process about eight million shipments and judging by the way the orders are pouring in , it will require to process a lot more in the coming months and years in the near future.