Sellers' protest ineffective as Flipkart adds more merchants

Flipkart has said that it has recruited around 3,000 merchants after it announced a new policy for its sellers few weeks ago, compensating this with other favourable measures, The Economic Times reported on Thursday. 

India's largest e-commerce player last month had told more than 90,000 of its sellers that it will charge higher commission on key categories such as fashion and sellers will have to bear the full cost of product returns. 

The e-commerce player had also revised the returns policy on some categories of products from 30 days to 10 days, Zeebiz reported on June 6. 

Flipkart had increased the commissions that merchants have to pay for selling on its platform by 5-6% in some key categories, resulting in some disgruntlement, cited The Economic Times news report.  

Online sellers group had virtually protested against Flipkart last week on June 20 due to change in its policy but the protest was ineffective. 

"We have been seeing an uptick in onboarding new sellers over the last few weeks," the report said quoting Flipkart's head of marketplace Anil Goteti, as saying. 

"The last figure we shared (earlier this month) was 90,000 sellers and it's now 93,000. This is across categories," Goteti said.

Four-six sellers delisted their products for about 30 minutes and brought them back online, Goteti added.