This morning, Walmart-owned Flipkart took to its India website to announce that they are temporarily suspending services across the country. The move came in after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the whole country would be under lockdown for the next 21 days due to the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus.
The e-commerce firm’s website states, “Hello fellow Indians, we are temporarily suspending our services. Your needs have always been our priority, and our promise is that we will be back to serve you, as soon as possible.
“These are difficult times, times like no other. Never before, have communities stayed apart to stay safe. Never before, has been at home meant helping the nation. We urge you to stay home and stay safe.”
Rival e-commerce giant Amazon India on Tuesday announced that the company, however, is not suspending all its services but are being selective in terms of its deliveries.
The statement said, “To serve customers’ most urgent needs while also ensuring the safety of our employees, we are temporarily prioritising our available fulfillment and logistics capacity to serve products that are currently critical for our customers such as household staples, packaged food, health care, hygiene, personal safety, and other high priority products. This also means that we have to temporarily stop taking orders and disable shipments for lower-priority products.”
Other e-platforms like Big Basket and Grofers are facing difficulties – with normal delivery services and customer orders due to logistics and the closure of warehouses.
Albinder Dhindsa, Grofers co-founder and CEO tweeted yesterday: Our @grofers warehouse in Faridabad was closed by local law enforcement today. While we understand they are doing their duty, essential items will be denied to 20,000+ households in Faridabad and Delhi every. We need help in sorting this out.
Big basket has updated its website homepage notifying its customers, “We’ll be back soon. We are currently experiencing unprecedented demand. In light of this, we are restricting access to our website to existing customers only. Please try again in a few hours.”
