Even as quick commerce companies have begun delivering clothes in 10 minutes, they have made traditional e-commerce firms sit up and look to reduce their own delivery times.
Myntra is testing out four-hour deliveries, Techcrunch reports. The trials are going on in New Delhi and Bengaluru, and could be extended to several Indian cities by the end of the year. Myntra currently takes 2-3 days to deliver clothes to customers.
The quicker delivery times follow an internal assessment by Myntra, which found a significant increase in consumers’ propensity to complete purchases when offered shorter delivery times. Myntra had earlier launched its Express Delivery in certain cities, which delivered clothes in 24-48 hours, but seems to be dramatically decreasing those times with a new four-hour delivery service.
Myntra isn’t the only e-commerce portal that’s looking to get items faster to their customers. Nykaa has been testing out a service named Nykaa Now in Bengaluru, which delivers cosmetics to users in three hours. Flipkart has launched its 10-minute delivery service named Flipkart Now, and Amazon plans to launch its own quick commerce foray next year.
But delivering clothes in 10 minutes is trickier than delivering many other products. Clothes have several different sizes and designs, which means that they have an order of magnitude more SKUs than other products. As such, they would take up much larger amounts of space in dark stores, leading to higher storage costs. Fashion deliveries also need to contend with returns — estimates suggest that as many as 25 percent of all fashion e-commerce deliveries are returned in India, which can make the reverse logistics of collecting clothes challenging for quick commerce firms.
All this, however, hasn’t prevented quick commerce firms from partnering with fashion companies to deliver clothes in 10 minutes. Blinkit is already selling Jockey T shirts and innerwear on its platform, while Swiggy Instamart is looking to collaborate with FabIndia to deliver its kurtas. Zepto meanwhile has partnered with Puma to sell its jerseys, and is looking to expand to other products. These companies are still working out ways to process returns, with ideas such as processing returns at physical outlets of clothing brands being tested out.
These moves have meant that Myntra has had to look to ways to lower its own delivery times. It’s interesting that Myntra’s internal survey has shown that customers tend to purchase more clothes when they’re promised lower delivery times. In this age of instant gratification, it’s quite likely that all other things remaining equal, customers would prefer to receive orders in 10 minutes as opposed to waiting for them for days. And this behaviour could end up upending e-commerce — and hastening its switch to quick-commerce — in the years to come.