Online retailers, quick commerce firms shower gig workers with incentives to meet festive demand

For gig workers, earnings could spike this festival season as online retailers and quick commerce platforms to delivery firms go beyond usual incentives to bolster workforce to meet the rush. On offer: daily bonuses, overnight payouts, additional reward for 100% attendance, and mobile phones to motorbikes for top performers.

Companies including BigBasket, Zepto, Flipkart, Amazon, Delhivery, and Ecom Express are ramping up hiring during the auspicious period when Indians love to buy everything from mobile phones and washing machines to cars.

Special allowances are planned largely for the delivery staff on third-party payrolls. According to staffing firm Teamlease Services, a worker on an average could earn up to ₹40,000 a month during the period, a 10-15% jump over the previous year.

Tata-owned BigBasket is offering additional benefits such as loan and education incentives for workers to support their families in addition to daily and weekly bonuses, said Tanuja Tewari, chief human resources officer at the e-commerce company. As demand grows, the company is willing to increase payouts proportionately.

Festive season sales are expected to jump about 35% this year, according to a report by Teamlease, helped by the rise of quick commerce and an increase in consumer spending. NLB Services, a digital talent solutions provider, estimates that more than 10 lakh jobs could be created, with a notable surge in gig and female workforce participation.

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Delhivery, a listed logistics company, has launched a rider incentive scheme to boost daily, weekly and monthly earnings, co-founder and chief people's officer Suraj Saharan told Mint.

Its Delhi-based peer Ecom Express has rolled out a special referral programme for the festive season, allowing workers to earn as much as ₹1,500 a month for referring a new partner to join the platform, said chief operating officer Vishwachetan Nadamani.

Both the companies are going beyond monetary incentives. Delhivery will reward its top performers with Apple’s iPhones, Macbooks and two-wheelers. Ecom Express, too, will hand out motorbikes and appliances, including mixer-grinders, to those hitting milestones like most deliveries in a day.

“We have observed that these incentives result in a 30-40% increase in productivity of workers," Ecom’s Nadamani said.

Quick commerce boom

Facing competition from quick commerce, online retailers are preparing to cut delivery times.

Walmart Inc-backed Flipkart, which is set to kick off its Big Billion Days sale on 26 September, has strengthened its pan-India supply-chain network with the launch of 11 fulfilment centres in anticipation of growing demand.

It promises same-day delivery for over 2 lakh stock keeping units across 20 cities this festive season. That means the company will need to deploy more delivery fleets.

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Rival Amazon opened three new fulfilment centres—one each in Delhi-NCR, Guwahati, and Patna--and has created more than 110,000 seasonal jobs across its operations.

Madhav Krishna, founder and chief executive of blue-collar recruitment platform Vahan.ai, expects the number of quick commerce workers to spike twofold thanks to the festival demand.

Companies are offering 20-30% higher earnings than usual depending on the platform, Krishna said, adding that this is over and above the benefits workers get on completing milestones and working late hours.

Beyond metros

Smaller cities and towns are expected to boost demand even more.

Even though cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi and Hyderabad experience the highest number of orders, the largest growth comes from tier 2 cities like Raipur, Nagpur, and Jaipur, according to a September report by Delhivery.

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Zepto also anticipates greater demand for seasonal workers as it scales up its operations, especially in tier 2 and 3 cities. “To address this, we are proactively ramping up our efforts with targeted campaigns and attractive incentives for new gig workers," said chief operating officer Vikas Sharma. “Additionally, we have streamlined our training processes to ensure that new members are quickly and effectively integrated."

Offline sales

The festival period sees pitched battles between brick-and-mortar retailers and online platforms, who offer bigger discounts to lure buyers.

As retailers and consumer goods makers grapple with an inventory pile-up, electronics companies will reward sales teams if they manage to sell select products.

Haier India changes fee and incentive structures on demand and market priorities, said president NS Satish. The local arm of Chinese electronics maker is training its top 1,000 shop sellers ahead of the festive season. The company has 8,000 sales staff deployed across thousands of electronics shops.

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Teamlease is even looking to shift workers between regions to meet the growing demand for additional hands.

"The push is to get dark store workers from the northern and eastern regions to west and south. Companies are willing to pay ₹3,000 along with minimum wages to get their manpower," said Balasubramanian Anantha Narayanan, senior vice president at the company. Its delivery teams will get incentives depending on the volume and time slots.