Amazon said on Tuesday that it is temporarily discontinuing accepting orders for “lower-priority” products in India and prioritizing servicing urgent items such as household staples, health care, and personal safety products as the e-commerce player — along with several of their competitors — grapples with coronavirus outbreak in one of its key overseas markets.
“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,” the American e-commerce giant said in a statement.
“This also means that we have to temporarily stop taking orders and disable shipments for lower-priority products,” it added. Understandably, the company said it did not have a timeline to share for how long this new measure would last.
The move, which goes into effect today, comes as nearly every Indian state has imposed a lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Several other players including Flipkart, and grocers Grofers and BigBasket are also facing severe disruptions in their services as they struggle to procure items and deliver it to customers.
“Our warehouses in cities like Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi NCR have been forced lockdown and delivery partners from our local stores are being turned back. We are working around the clock to support people who are relying highly on our services and are waiting for the essential supplies at their homes,” said Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder and chief executive of Grofers, in a statement to TechCrunch.
Amazon said it is also reaching out to customers who have already placed an order for a lower priority item and giving them an option to get a full refund.
In certain parts of the country, Amazon has been unable to service essential products, too. State governments have been advised to allow e-commerce deliveries — at least the essential ones — but in many parts of the country, local authorities have yet to follow this advice.
Indian news outlet MediaNama reported on Tuesday that Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, a central government agency, has requested various state governments to allow e-commerce deliveries.
More to follow…
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