New Delhi: E-commerce com ponies have their ears to the ground in the capital as nearly 10,000 trade organisation leaders from across the country are expected to congregate here to protest against the government’s recent decision to allow FDI in B2C online marketplaces. E-trailers such as Snapdeal, eBay Amazon and Flipkart among others will be monitoring by three-day event rganised by small trades in New Delhi’s Talktora stadium said sources.
“It could out to be the biggest gathering in the country yet against e-trailers. I’ m flying down to Delhi on Monday to watch what’s going to happen “ said a senior executive of a large e-commerce company . “We will watch the space very closely as quite a lot of these traders double as sellers one-trailers platforms.”
Traders said they will protest against what they claim are loopholes in the FDI policy.
The guidelines in the new policy released on Tuesday restricted online marketplaces from directly in fluencing targeting large vendors such as WS Retail on Flipkart and Cloudtail total sales on an online market place from a group company or vendor at 25%.
Experts said the norms could strangle deep discounting by e-trailers thus giving brick-and-mortar retailers a level-playing field. For instance Crisil in a report on Thursday said aggressive discounting by e-commerce players had hurt the profitability of offine retailers over the years but the new guidelines could bring back revenue growth for them especially for those in apparel and consumer durables businesses.
But traders are unmoved. “What stops Amazon or Flipkart from creating more than one Cloudtail or one WS Retail said Praveen Khandelwal secretary general of Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) contributing to 40% of topline they will create multiple they than 25% to sales each.
Khandelwal said the domestic trading community consisting of around 5.4 crore small traders is a large vote bank for the ruling Bharatiya Jantat Party (BJP). The traders event has the potboilers with policipate leaders and financial institutions expected to participate this time. If the situation calls for it we may even resort to strikes “ he said.
“Also there is no mention of consequences if norms are flouted by e-trailers. We need clarity on a lot of issues,”
