In a bid to curb the spread of coronavirus in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 24 declared a 21-day nationwide lockdown starting from Tuesday. Complying with the government’s order, e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart have made necessary changes in their delivery patterns. While Flipkart has temporarily suspended its services, rival Amazon has announced that it will not deliver low-priority items.
Amazon India on Tuesday announced that it will halt orders for non-essential products to prioritize customers’ urgent needs and will focus solely on supplying the essential products. Amazon India’s global senior VP and country head Amit Agarwal took to Twitter to make the announcement and wrote, To serve our customers’ most urgent needs while also ensuring the safety of our associates, we are prioritizing (with immediate effect) all our resources to serve products that are currently high priority. Stay safe!
Aggarwal also posted the link of a blog post by Amazon which revealed that changes will be effective from March 24. “These changes are in effect from 24th March 2020, and we will update when we resume normal operations. We will follow all Centre and State Government guidance on this. We continue to work with concerned government authorities to ensure on-ground support that will enable us to offer a more expanded selection to fulfill customer needs,” the Amazon blog read.
Amazon also stated that customers who had placed their orders prior to the announcement choice to cancel their orders and get a refund. This would be only applicable for customers who have ordered low-priority products. “We are seeing an increased demand for priority products and important services. To serve our customers’ most urgent needs while also ensuring the safety of our employees, we are temporarily prioritizing our available fulfilment 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,” the blog further read.
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