Bhubaneswar: Amazon India has temporarily suspended accepting orders for “lower priority” goods as the country went under lockdown from Wednesday midnight. Also, Walmart-owned Flipkart stopped accepting all new orders from Tuesday midnight. Amazon, instead, will only be prioritising urgent commodities like household staples, healthcare and medical products, and personal safety items.
Businesses have been bleeding in India following the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus. Also, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo’s India bottling partner Varun Beverages have closed all their production facilities in India. So far more than 400,000 have tested positive for the virus globally, resulting in over 18,000 deaths. In India, 600 have tested positive, while 11 have succumbed to the infection.
Amazon, Flipkart suspend non-essential goods
Both Amazon and Flipkart from Tuesday stopped accepting orders for non-essential goods. Amazon in a blog post said: “To serve our customers’ most urgent needs while also ensuring 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.”
Amazon’s move comes just days after it took a similar decision to prioritise essential goods in the United States and Italy. Last week, Amazon decided to stop shipping lower priority goods in Italy and Spain, two of the countries that have been affected the most in Europe.
Flipkart, on the other hand, will be first segregating things and then start accepting orders for essential commodities. Rajneesh Kumar, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Flipkart, in a statement said: “Flipkart has temporarily suspended orders as we assess the possibilities of operating in the lockdown. We are prioritising the safety of our delivery executives and seeking the support of the local governments and police authorities to meet the needs of our customers as they stay home during this lockdown.” The companies didn’t give a specific time for resumption of normal services.
Coca-Cola, Pepsi halt production
Coca-Cola has said that it has stopped production at all its facilities in India as businesses have come to a standstill over the past few days. The 21-day lockdown will only deepen the crisis. The US beverage maker said that it is operating its manufacturing units in small numbers to produce essential items like packaged water, juices, tea and coffee in limited numbers as per government guidelines.
The company in a statement announced: “In compliance with the government directive, we at the Coca-Cola system in India have temporarily suspended production at our manufacturing facilities.” Also, Pepsi’s bottling partner in India, Varun Beverages has closed down all its corporate offices and factories across India.
— Ritujaay Ghosh
