Flipkart, India’s homegrown marketplace is introducing a separate marketplace model ‘Flipkart Xtra’ with an aim to give flexible earning opportunities to individuals, service agencies and technicians. This new platform will also help bolster Flipkart’s supply chain to ensure seamless and faster delivery of shipments and service to consumers across India while creating part-time opportunities for individuals.
Offered through the app ‘Flipkart Xtra’ available on the Google play store, Flipkart will provide a simple and seamless onboarding experience to interested individuals. With a few simple steps that include downloading the app and sharing information for background verification, individuals will be able to onboard themselves for various roles, including delivery executives to start with, and service partners or technicians in the coming months. As this platform scales up in the coming months, the launch just prior to the festive season and the company’s Big Billion Days, will help thousands of individuals, technicians and service agencies across the country providing access to opportunities of additional work and earnings as delivery partners. With e-commerce enabling anytime and anywhere access to products, the Flipkart Xtra program will help create flexible earning opportunities while augmenting deliveries.
The ‘Flipkart Xtra’ app offers partners the advantage of signing up from anywhere and the flexibility of choosing their preferred schedule to deliver shipments. This is an extension of Flipkart’s alternate delivery models that include the Flipkart Kirana program, which has witnessed consistent growth over recent years. During last year’s festive season the kirana delivery model fulfilled 10 million shipments.
Hemant Badri, Senior Vice-President and Head of Supply Chain at Flipkart, said, “As an organisation committed to creating value for all stakeholders including sellers, artisans, MSMEs, kiranas and customers, we are constantly expanding the scope of our partnership to equitably distribute the benefits of e-commerce. In this endeavour, we introduced numerous initiatives such as the immensely popular kirana delivery program and are pleased to launch Flipkart Xtra, our service marketplace, to give flexible earning opportunities to individuals, local stores and even service technicians. This is a new disruption in the gig economy space and will help individuals find an alternate source of income while contributing to the country’s economic recovery.”
Industry reports from BCG suggest that the gig economy has the potential to service up to 90 million jobs in India’s non-farm economy alone, transact over $250 billion in the volume of work, and contribute an incremental 1.25 percent (approximately) to India’s GDP over the long term.
