CAIT pilots e-stores for traders, to go live nationally by March

Traders body Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) is piloting individual e-stores for traders in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

CAIT has been working on e-stores for the past three months and plans to go live nationally in the next two-three months.

“E-commerce is a rapidly growing future mode of business and we have undertaken a task to align the trading community with e-commerce by creating individual e-store of every trader in the country,” said Praveen Khandelwal, secretary-general of CAIT.

The pilot has been successful and almost over in Madhya Pradesh, he added.

Khandelwal further added that traders body is not against online commerce in India. All it wants is the proper implementation of govt FDI policy and fair practice of the trade.

For the past several months, CAIT, along with lakhs of small traders have been protesting against deep discounting and anti-competition practices. 

The trader’s body has also approached multiple ministries complaining about dominant anti-competitive practices exercised by Amazon and Flipkart.

On Jan 15, it staged protests across multiple cities against Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, who arrived in India for a three-day visit.

As per traders body, the current model of Amazon and Flipkart involving predatory pricing, private labels and deep discounting have created distortionary effects by driving out the offline traders from the market.

Both  e-comm firms are facing a probe by the competition commission of India (CCI) over alleged anti-competitive practices. Khandelwal also took potshot on Bezos $1 billion investment announcement in India.

“It’s not an investment but promotional finance to Amazon India to crush retail trade and encouraging his team in India to do more predatory pricing and deep discounting and go on in violating FDI policy,” he added.