“Pickrr gets around 80% traffic of its tracking page from mobile devices”

At a time when your smartphone has become the centre of almost every activity, how logistics can be behind in terms of leveraging the current trend. For an industry on constant move, mobile devices and apps come across as a natural choice and they have the potential to play an impactful role in ensuring accurate data capture, consistent and real-time information flow and tighter collaboration. Delhi-based Pickrr is one virtual logistics company that is setting a trend with mobile solutions in play. Rhitiman Majumder, Co-founder and CEO, Pickrr.com, speaks more about the benefits for mobile adoption in the logistics industry, in an interaction with Ramesh Kumar Raja. Excerpts:

How mobile phones have brought a sort of revolution in the logistics sector? The evolution of technology is pushing the boundaries and changing how the world does business. Today, we’re accustomed to everything being online and right at our fingertips for immediate access. Through Amazon, the pioneer of fast-paced delivery service, it’s possible to receive a package less than an hour after ordering, depending on where you live. Improved technology has also increased productivity in the supply chain, minimizing costs and errors. These advances benefit all areas of the logistics industry: trucking transportation, international transportation (ocean and air), supply chain management, and shipment tracking. The Push to e-commerce: A lot of success that the e-commerce industry has witnessed in the last 5 years can be attributed to the wide adoption of mobile phones and cheap connectivity. With the

rise in e-commerce buying, the logistics industry has evolved to a customer-centric industry from a pure operations heavy industry with minimal individual customer touch-points.

Shipment Tracking Systems: Previously, customers booked shipments, received an estimated delivery date and then were left in the dark, unless they decided to make a phone call. Today, internet and software advances allow customers access to shipping and tracking systems 24/7. Pickrr too provides simplified one click order tracking on mobile phones, we get around 80% traffic of our tracking page from mobile devices.

Social Media: Who doesn’t check some sort of social media platform every day? The power of social media is optimizing the logistics industry and operations as a whole. These platforms are becoming the easiest and most efficient way for companies to communicate with customers, conveying urgent information, industry news, and customer responses quickly.

What changes have you observed during the COVID-19 era when mobile was the only ray of hope for all? In the initial days of lockdown the whole non-essential category which

formed a major chunk of our business was banned which impacted our business. Although it has started to improve a bit after may, the most hit categories- Apparels and electronics formed as much as 70% of our business pre-lockdown. Since then, we have strategically moved to essentials categories like Food, Ayurveda, and medicines and looking to meet our prelockdown numbers by next month.

Our product categories have evolved from the time lockdown and restrictions have started. We have seen a 10x increase in the number of edible/food category, around 6x increase in Ayurveda related products and around 5x increase in medicine/health related products that are being dispatched through us.

As our sellers evolved during these tough times, we did too. We introduced contact-less deliveries and hyperlocal deliveries so that customers can get orders in a timely and safe manner. Unlike some of the logistics companies, we have not been charging any additional costs in this period so that our sellers too do not have to increase product prices in these tough times. With so much confusion regarding which products are allowed, which locations are serviceable, safety concerns etc. we started logistics consulting for any online seller that contacts us.

What makes Pickrr different from others? How are you making the best use of technology? even when we are in the logistics business which is conventionally considered heavy on operations, we have always been a technology company. Our product has been built from scratch in-house.

Following are some of

“The power of social media is optimizing the logistics industry and operations as a whole. These platforms are becoming the easiest and most efficient way for companies to communicate with customers, conveying urgent information, industry news, and customer responses quickly” our features that have been made possible due to our tech capabilities

• Real time order tracking

• Real time NDR

• Integration with all e-commerce

platforms

Apart from these, we have highly evolved internal dashboards that our team uses for scheduling pickups, maintaining sales pipeline and across client reports to judge performance. All of these have helped us scale massively without increasing our team size.

What are the current trends you are witnessing in the mobile tech and logistics space? logistics sector earned infrastructure status in 2017 when its market size was estimated at $160 billion. According to Ibef, the Indian logistics market was expected to reach $215 billion by 2020, logging a 10.5 per cent cagr over 2017.

One of the major trends we have seen in our market is the growth of d2c brands, which is mostly powered by mobile adoption.

As far as smart logistics are concerned, we see that our sellers do not want to have multiple parties on board for logistics and want a single company to take care of b2b/b2c operations, warehousing, scheduling etc. so that they can focus on their core operations. We have been able to provide a one-stop solution to an extent and are moving towards a complete solution every day.

What’s your plan in the next few years? Our plan is to consolidate all possible logistics services at a single platform. All tech-related services are being built in-house and all operations related services are being offered through our partners. We are actively looking at warehousing as an avenue for growth in the near future. ■