Cash-on-Delivery: Postal department sees Rs 1,300 cr in FY16

India Post is cashing in on the boom in e-commerce deliveries, especially the surging cash-on-delivery consignments of the country’s top online sellers — Amazon, Snapdeal and Flipkart-Myntra.

The postal department’s revenues by ways of COD consignments from e-commerce majors have surged to Rs 1,300 crore during the year ending March 2016, up from Rs 500 crore during the whole of 2014-15, and just Rs 100 crore in 2013-14. The deliveries are primarily directed at tier-II towns, and parts of the rural heartland, where India Post has unparalleled reach.

The incremental e-commerce revenue boost, said Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad, are proving to be a big boost for the postal department. “The postal department collected Rs 1,300 crore in COD collections during 2015-16, compared with Rs 100 crore in 2013-14,” Prasad told The Indian Express.

However, according to India Post documents, it had expected the remittances from COD to exceed Rs 1,500 crore during 2015-16.

The postal department has tied-up with more than 400 e-commerce companies including Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, YepMe, Shopclues for delivering e-commerce pre-paid as well as COD orders. According to India Post, Jeff Bezos-led Amazon is India Post’s largest business partner in e-commerce.

As of December 2015, average monthly consignments from the department’s top six e-commerce customers was up over six-fold, primarily on account of a big surge in Amazon’s deliveries, which had sharply jumped to 3 lakh consignments until December 2015 from an average of 50,000 in 2014-15.

Average numbers of consignments from Snapdeal had reached 80,000 until December 2015, as against 35,000 in 2014-15. Flipkart-Myntra have clocked average consignment numbers of about 80,000 so far this year.

Prasad had earlier told The Indian Express that the incremental e-commerce revenue boost, was at the heart of his plans to revive the fortunes of India’s postal service.