As the lockdown policy to keep people staying at home continues, many, mostly cosmopolitan communities, are taking advantages of ordering for essential item online. While this is highly encouraging on one hand, on the other, due to overwhelming number of people placing huge volumes of orders online, there is sudden shortages of manpower for delivering the packages.
For the sudden increase in demand companies are struggling to deliver the packages. Due to a large number of orders and the small number of delivery staff, many company officials said that they are unable to cope with the demand for the products. Hence, customers are receiving products three to four days or even a week later after placing an order, which they supposed to deliver within three to four hours.
Meanwhile, the sudden rush for the online shopping is apparently becoming more and more obvious with customers complaining that they are often unable to access specific websites of the companies selling the products. According to e-commerce information, demand for cloth and cosmetics remained high till March. However, since end of March, demand for food and grocery products have sharply increased.
Country’s renowned e-commerce site evaly has also introduced evaly express for meeting the grocery demand. Its CEO Mohammad Rassel told Bangladesh Post, “It’s a big challenge to keep supply chain stable. However, we are trying to reach essentials commodities to the customers' doorstep through our 200 express shops. Everyday we are receiving more than 3000 orders at our express shop”.
Acknowledging the shortage of delivery staff, Rassel said, “There are not enough people on the ground, movement from warehouses has become intermittent, resulting in delay in product delivery. Due to the pandemic, normal official activities are being disrupted and so many of our delivery staff are oftenprevented from making deliveries.”
Zia Ashraf, founder and chief managing officer of Chaldal, said, "Our orders have substantially increased since the outbreak of coronavirus. In the past where our daily average order was around 3500 daily, now the average orders hover around 20,000 daily. But the number of our delivery staff members are much smaller. It is not possible to deliver so many products everyday.”
According to E-commerce Association of Bangladesh (e-cab), there are over 20,000 domestic entrepreneurs involved in e-commerce business in last few years. The e-commerce transactions in the country during the last financial year was about Tk 1.5 billion. The e-commerce sector is growing at about 20 percent every year in the country.
The prominent companies in online business are, 'Daraz.com, chaldal.com, othoba.com, PriyaShop, ajkerdeal, shawpno, MeenaClick, Evaley, BagDoom, Pickaboo and Rokomari.
