Abstract:
E-commerce is way of selling of goods through electronic medium of E-retail applications. The digital innovations like e-payment system, advertisements and marketing, analytics driven customer engagement and government initiatives have led to the increase of the E-commerce market in India within the last five years. An innovative selling proposition of E-commerce is only possible with effective logistic support so it has to adapt with the growing trends like promptness in the delivery system with equal importance to the price and quality of products ordered. The insufficient and poor transport connectivity and inappropriate strategic location of E-commerce logistics facilities is one of pivotal reasons in the E-commerce industry.The present scenario of the delivery of E-commerce services for the demand nodes in Madhya Pradesh is insensitive to the temporal trend of increase in the demand of consignments ordered and its impact on the delivery due to insufficient space and inappropriate strategic locations of logistics facilities. This thesis is an attempt to study the existing E-commerce demand and the logistic facilities catering to it for finding the loopholes in the supply chain process for Madhya Pradesh. From the responses of the online shoppers of six major cities Bhopal, Indore, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Ujjain, Sagar, the customers online buying behaviour, willingness to shift to online shopping, factors influencing their buying decisions, existing quality of delivery service is analysed. The routes for transporting consignment orders among the E-commerce logistic facilities is also analysed to understand the existing supply chain network and service level demand considering consumer location.The research findings are subsequently used to project the demand for consignments, warehouse requirements in all existing E-commerce logistic facilities and service level demand nodes in Madhya Pradesh by the year 2025. Accordingly, the recommendations are made in order to cater to the projected demand incorporating re-design of GIS based supply chain network for efficient and effective delivery system focusing on the decentralization of the location of Ecommerce logistic facilities in the study region.
