Flipkart’s First Employee Who Was Once a Delivery Boy-Now a Multi-Millionaire

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This is the story of Ambur Iyyappa, who was working as a delivery boy 12 years ago with a courier company. At the moment, he is a multi-millionaire courtesy of the colossal e-commerce, Flipkart. Iyyapa’s transformation is incredible to come across and the story should be known by all.

Born and brought up in Ambur which is a small town in the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu, Iyyappa acquired a diploma in Ambur and began working with Ashok Leyland, the automotive manufacturer in Hosur. Later he shifted to work with Hindustan Motors for some time before moving to Bengaluru to work with First Flight, the courier company as a delivery boy.

He was quick on grasping operations at the workplace and soon learned the nuances of a courier company. Iyyappa had a tenure of 4 years. He was leading the complete mail logistics section for South Bengaluru by the end of the tenure. The company First Flight then collaborated with Flipkart.

Flipkart back then had just entered the e-commerce market. Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, co-founders of Flipkart wanted in-house logistics manager. One of their employees suggested them about Iyyappa. That is how he was hired for the then-budding startup Flipkart.

Flipkart did not have any human resource department and hence could not provide Iyyappa with an official offer letter. However, Iyyappa instinctively joined the startup.

According to Sachin Bansal, all they were looking for a person who could use a computer and could speak a little English. Iyyappa was offered a very low salary of about Rs 8,000, as he then was unemployed and had no prospect.

In the beginning, Iyyappa faced a lot of challenges. The company then was operating with 10-12 major publishers and conducted around 100 shipments in a day. Progressively, Iyyappa was the resource of knowledge at Flipkart about what was happening in the company, making his bosses give him the tag of ‘Human EPR’.

He would know exactly which were the books pending to be bought and which customers were waiting for delivery. He effectively would paste all the order details on Gmail and facilitated that as ERP servicing search engine for orders.

As per Binny Bansal, resolving customer experience issues keeps Iyyappa going. Iyyappa today is an Associate Director at Flipkart for Customer Experience Management.

Ambur Iyyappa is a humble man and the fact can be established by his way of living. His earnings are around Rs 6 Lakh but he still chooses to ride on his Suzuki Access 125 scooter for commuting. Iyyappa resides in the same house that his family has been staying in since the last 10 years.

(Photo Credit: Flipkart Stories)