Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, has decided to visit India, where he is planning to meet the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and other government officials and industry stakeholders to ease out the e-commerce regulatory challenges in the country. The meeting will be held on the 15th and 16th of January in Delhi, where the event will be a way in which Amazon will attract more startups, small and medium businesses/enterprises, weavers, artisans to be a part of the platform.
Amid this, thousands of small-scale trader’s unions and associations have planned to organize protests across the country. These protests will be hosted by the trader’s body, Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), and the protests will be held across 300 cities as the CEO stays in India. The CAIT comprises of over 70 million brick-and-mortar retailers, and they have accused e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Flipkart for violating the FDI laws as the platforms offer deep discounts, predatory pricing, inventory control, and a biased seller system.
Big trouble for e-commerce platforms, traders address the concern
The CAIT wrote a letter to the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman about the way e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, and other portals were selling goods at prices below the market value, hence violating the regulations of goods and services tax (GST) revenue. In 2019, the minister of commerce, Piyush Goyal, said that the e-commerce companies are being cooperative, and they are transparent about the operations that are carried out every day in the company.
The e-commerce companies and retail traders in India are waiting for the National e-commerce Policy, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has come forward to push the self-regulation measures and mitigate some of the existing issues of the e-commerce sector of the country.
The CCI has asked e-commerce companies to keep a check on several issues like discounting, revision in contract, review mechanism, data collection, and search ranking along with several other things to look after.
