A few of these startups in the logistics space hopped on to the e-commerce bandwagon — some a decade ago — and have carved a niche for themselves. Fortune India has identified five such ventures as part of its Most Promising Startups issue. XpressBees tops the list with revenues of ₹2,604 crore in FY23 — as per data from Tracxn — followed by Shiprocket, LoadShare, Cogoport, and Shipsy.

XpressBees, founded in 2015 by Amitava Saha — who is also one of the founders of FirstCry — provides B2C, B2B, cross-border logistics and 3PL (third-party) logistics. The company facilitates more than 3 million shipments across over 20,000 pin codes. It has a network encompassing 3,500 service centres, 150 hubs, and a team of over 28,000 field representatives.

Shiprocket, an e-commerce enablement platform, logged revenues to the tune of ₹1,358 crore in FY24, according to data from Tracxn. Meanwhile, LoadShare’s revenues stood at ₹348 crore in FY24, according to Tracxn data. LoadShare started off in 2017 with partial truckload (PTL) services for clients, focussing on smaller towns, but later tapped into quick commerce, dark stores and warehousing solutions.

It is evident that e-commerce is the common thread amid the new-age logistics players. In line with the adage, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, Saha founded XpressBees when he realised that the existing logistics players were mostly into third-party logistics, warehousing, and business to business (B2B), and were not sufficiently catering to the needs of e-commerce players like FirstCry. “The current set of logistics partners were not giving us what we wanted in terms of e-commerce deliveries or special deliveries for FirstCry customers,” Saha, also MD & CEO of XpressBees, tells Fortune India.

Having deep roots in the startup ecosystem came as an advantage. “Being a startup founder myself, I knew other founders well. Paytm had just launched the Paytm Mall. Snapdeal and Shopclues were a couple of years old. They contacted me. So, that is when I thought of setting up something that could help other customers as well. And that is how it all started,” Saha says. Almost a decade later, Saha has plans to go public, though he does not share a timeline.

“We started off as an e-commerce logistics company. That is the bulk of what we do. And e-commerce has grown very well. Whatever we are today is primarily built on the back of the e-commerce logistics,” says Saha.

According to him, B2C accounts for the largest share of revenues for the company at about 75%, while the other three verticals — B2B, 3PL, and cross-border logistics contribute to the balance 20-25%.

Similarly, the idea behind Shiprocket — which was founded in 2017 and offers comprehensive tech services to independent smaller merchants — came from a product around helping small and medium enterprises go online. “We operated in the direct commerce part of the market. We provided the operating system and digital infrastructure to small merchants, selling either offline or through Instagram directly... But we realised that the smaller merchants almost always struggled with cash on delivery and proper shipping, says MD & CEO Saahil Goel, adding that a chunk of the unstructured commerce market was with retail couriers. “That is how this business was happening, until we became a middleware between the two.”

Today, e-commerce and parcel shipping account for about 75% of Shiprocket’s business, with about 150,000 small businesses actively using its services every year, says Goel. “Today, we deliver over a 100 million transactions every year,” he says, adding that micro SMEs and home businesses are trying their services out across fashion, textiles, jewellery, ethnic products, and wellness.

The players are bullish on the medium- to long-term outlook for e-commerce opportunities. “E-commerce has grown and will definitely continue to grow. In different verticals, the e-channel or the electronic channel is different. For example, for electronics and mobile phones, 50% of the transactions today happen through e-commerce. Fashion is in early double-digits. Heavy electronics like consumer durables are still in low single digits. So, it is about how the industry is transforming,” says Saha.

Talking of the other areas, Saha says that while airline tickets are 100% online today, as are classifieds, he thinks that offline will always exist.

e-Commerce Boom

How logistics startups are fuelling India’s e-commerce explosion