An e-commerce platform is supposed to give all sellers an equal opportunity to succeed. This is mandated by law.
However, it’s an open secret that both Flipkart and Amazon have been in blatant violation of the FDI law by having direct links with their “preferred sellers” since forever. Upon quizzing the top five sellers of both Flipkart and Amazon, it was found that most of them were directly related.
Some were former employees, others were kin of former employees. I won’t be surprised if it was someday found that some were even drivers of employees.
These platforms have essentially been controlling these “puppet” sellers’ inventory, stock, warehouses, profit margins and even their auditors. These sellers are nothing but shell companies of the platforms themselves. It’s a brazen scam.
And this isn’t anything new. It’s been going on for a long time. These companies with their battery of lawyers always managed to get the courts to stop any proceedings against them. What a sham.
And you know a very good part? Until some time ago, Mr. Narayana Murthy was formally a part of of one of these shell companies with Amazon. His Catamaran Ventures was in a joint venture with Cloudtail. This was a wilful and clear violation of the FDI law.
They might have saved themselves from being called clear violators of the “letter of law”. But the “spirit of law”? It was violated with absolute indifference and shamelessness. Talk about “Indians should work hard for the growth of country”.
With this brazen disrespect of the law and regulations, these platforms have reduced the marketplaces into “multi brand sale platforms” only for their gains. Essentially jacking the market. This is very much similar to how Swiggy and Zomato were trying to open their own cloud kitchens, directly undercutting the restaurant “partners” on the back of whom their platforms were built. The food guys didn’t succeed because of operational difficulties. But the e-comm guys have been at it for a long time.
This should be a very big scandal. But the truth is nobody gives a shyt about small businesses and whether they get trampled on or hit by a truck tomorrow.
This is why nobody is stepping in to stop predatory pricing by the new age platforms either. Whenever they wake up, it’ll probably be too late. But what can you do about it?
A lot of people think such violations of the law are okay, and so is the death of Kirana stores by the hands of the hyper funded Q Comm companies. Why? Because these small businesses are “dinosaurs” who didn’t “evolve with time”.
Well, those people are foucking illiterates.
These small businesses and Kirana shops are the bedrock upon which this country is built and still stands. 90 percent of the total workforce of our country is engaged in the informal economy, and there are about 12 Million Kirana stores which don’t just make the nation’s economy, but also its community.
If the small guys get hurt, the cascading effects of that will be hard to imagine.
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