E-commerce giants offer tech-friendly policies to woo offline sellers

They are offering new-age tech based products such as AI-led cataloguing, coupled with easy settlements and attractive platform fees that enable ease of doing e-commerce business

Geetank Bajaj and his father run a family business in Delhi called MGM Garments, which deals in women's clothing. When coronavirus broke out in 2020, their business got impacted due to the lockdown-related curbs. It was then that Bajaj took his offline business online for the first time with the help of e-commerce firm Flipkart. The company also provided him insights about the products required for listing, the fabric types and colours in demand, while also promoting its own unique products that are popular at its offline store.

“Registering on Flipkart has helped me recover from the financial losses my family suffered amid the pandemic, taking my business turnover to Rs 3 crore,” said Bajaj of MGM Garments, who is also a Flipkart seller.

Bajaj is among many sellers who came onboard Flipkart during the pandemic, which had accelerated the shift towards e-commerce as more and more consumers began shopping online with greater frequency.

Flipkart has now come up with a slew of new marketplace policies and capabilities to enable ease of doing business online. The Walmart-owned firm said that these include easy settlements, simplified rate card, single final settlement value for sellers and reduction in the platform Fee. It is also providing growth programmes such as Flipkart Ignite and Business Experts to hand-hold sellers; AI-led cataloguing support and other policies to drive more profitably for them on the Flipkart platform.

“At the beginning of the year, we took a mandate to look at the needs of the sellers post-Covid and bring in technology-led solutions,” said Jagjeet Harode, senior director and head–Marketplace, Flipkart. “We want to make it very easy for any entrepreneur in India to come online and start selling. We want to democratise e-commerce.”

For instance, Flipkart’s catalogue creation through an AI-led image editing solution has resulted in significant cost reduction for all sellers across the verticals.

Flipkart Ignite, a dedicated training and incubation programme, supports the growth of sellers who have been newly onboarded onto the platform. This also includes facilities such as free ad credits, exclusive training sessions and image editing. There is also a Business Experts programme that aims to enhance the progress of existing sellers on the platform who wish to grow their business performance further. 

Sellers will also get one assured settlement value irrespective of service profile, zone or payment mode. This will bring a high degree of predictability for the sellers, thus making it easier for them to operate online.

“Our goal is focused on reducing the cost of operations through tech-led interventions, assisting them (seller partners) across all touchpoints and supplementing their business needs,” said Divyesh Shah, senior director and head of marketplace product and technology, Flipkart.

These new initiatives are an extension of the recent measures introduced by Flipkart this year. This includes the 10-minute onboarding process, ease of listing, and payment policies. Simplifying the onboarding process through mobile phones with fewer steps has resulted in a 2x increase in onboarded sellers and a 4x jump from the sign-up stage. 

Flipkart continues to strengthen its seller base and was on track to have 420,000 sellers on its platform by December last year. It had onboarded 75,000 new sellers on its platform last year ahead of the festive season. The new sellers predominantly came from Tier 2 and 3 markets such as Agra, Indore, Panipat and Rajkot.

Flipkart's rival Amazon crossed the one million seller milestone across India in December. The firm had started in India in 2013 with 100 sellers. Notably, more than 90 per cent of the sellers on Amazon are small and medium local businesses (SMBs) and over half of these sellers on the marketplace come from tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

Since January 2020, more than 450,000 new sellers have joined Amazon and over 100,000 of these new sellers are local offline retailers & neighbourhood stores that have onboarded the Amazon marketplace through the 'Local Shops on Amazon' programme.

Other initiatives include taking Chai Cart and Tatkal vans to markets and SMB hubs in cities across India for increasing awareness about e-commerce. It has been launching several India first innovations for Amazon like Seller Flex and Easy Ship.

The firm has also been creating focused programs to address key seller cohorts like ‘Karigar’ for weavers and artisans, ‘Saheli’ for women entrepreneurs and ‘Launchpad’ for emerging direct-to-consumer brands.

Early this year, SoftBank-internet commerce firm Meesho, launched initiatives for its sellers, --an industry-first ‘Zero Penalty’ and ‘7-Day Payments’. The firm said the features will help create a level playing field for small and medium businesses to operate online. 

Having helped more than 400,000 sellers across the country digitise their businesses, the ‘Zero Penalty’ feature ensures sellers are not penalised for self or auto cancellation of orders. Meesho aims at enabling 100 million small businesses to do e-commerce.