Daraz Nepal is gearing up for the country's biggest online sale of the year, 11.11. With big savings and massive deals and offers, the online marketplace has been setting new record for sales during the 11.11 campaign. The last record set during the fourth edition of 11.11 in 2021 was serving 700,000 Nepali online shoppers on the platform within 24 hours and generating more than Rs 360 million in sales. This year, the company has already signed agreements with 18 leading banks to provide discounts worth 20 per cent or maximum Rs 3,000 via debit or credit card prepayment for the 11.11 event. Against this backdrop, Bimal Aryal, chief operating officer of Daraz Nepal, shared his insights with The Himalayan Times on the logistical challenges in hosting such massive campaigns and the measures put in place for effective service delivery. Excerpts:

E-commerce in Nepal is challenging in terms of service delivery. How did Daraz manage to provide services at 101 locations in such a short period of time?

Providing delivery services to over 100 cities in a geographically diverse country like ours has been a challenging experience. At the same time, it has made us realise that more needs to be done.

Our logistic expansions over the past few years have shown that with the right amount of effort, it is indeed possible to connect customers from every part of the country. We were offering delivery services to only 27 cities just a few years ago. We expanded our coverage to over 50 cities last year and now we are offering delivery services to more than 100 cities. This was made possible through our partnership with multiple logistic partners.

We have also been able to help many partners establish their logistic businesses from the ground up. As of now, 50 per cent of our logistic partners use robust technology and systems for logistic management. Furthermore, with an aim to set the foundation for scalability, and to make our logistic solutions more efficient and customer-centric, we are continuous in our effort to exchange knowledge, and learnings with all of our logistics partners. We also do a periodic review of our logistic performances to ensure that we have a set of standardised processes across the country and we continuously channel all the customer feedback to integrate into our product, process and people strategy.

How easy is it for customers to make returns? What should customers know about the return process?

For both the customer and the seller, one of the major pain points of the e-commerce business is product returns, which is why it is quite important to have an easy return policy to offer a seamless online experience for all.

At Daraz, we have seven days free return for non-Daraz Mall products and 14 days free return for Daraz Mall products. Customers can choose to initiate the return within the set timeframes. Customers can either request our logistics partners to collect their parcels from their desired location or they can choose to drop off the parcel at their nearest Daraz hubs or drop off locations.

Once the products are received from the customer, it goes through a quality control validation process where we check to see if the customer claim is valid or not. If found valid, the full amount will either be refunded to the customer with a voucher (which can be used for future purchases) or will be refunded via bank transfer based on the details provided by the customer.

Furthermore, to make the return process much more simple and convenient, we recently kicked off our partnership with Nepal Post Office through which select General Post Offices will function as drop off locations for customers seeking to return a product.

We have also been working very closely with IME remittance agent network to provide similar return services to our customers.

Purchases significantly increase during big campaigns like 11.11. What steps is Daraz taking to ensure faster and more reliable delivery?

What infrastructure and logistical preparations have you made to meet customer demands? 'To fail to prepare is to prepare to fail', everything starts with proper planning followed by smooth execution. With that in mind, we implement key pillars to execute our 11.11 campaign.

During mega campaigns, our volume increases exponentially and it is important that we have the right infrastructure to support our on ground operations. We have a robust system with improved product features that help us monitor the status of every single package. We have also ensured that we have a solid logistics network across the country for uninterrupted logistics processes. In this regard, we along with our delivery partners have already started securing additional space for our fulfilment and delivery operations targeting these mega campaigns.

Another aspect of the campaign preparation is making people ready. No matter how well we plan, at the end of the day, people execute it. We started hiring well in advance to train our delivery heroes to have the right and competent skills to deliver results.

It's quite natural that we have lots of inflow of returning and new customers during the campaign and providing the best experience is a crucial component of campaign execution. We have different interfaces through which customers interact with us, for example our delivery heroes, our delivery facility staff, live chat, and different channels through which customers reach us. Throughout the year, we have improved our processes and adopted new tools to make logistics processes userfriendly, hassle-free and simple. Some of the highlights of our improved processes are; seller self-scan through which we have enabled them to scan and handover customer packages in our drop off facilities without human intervention and we have also implemented queue management systems in our major facilities where there is high inflow of sellers and customers. To make the customer return process easy and convenient, we have also expanded our return drop off network along with our associate partners.

A version of this article appears in the print on November 3, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.