Sellers are not agreeing with Flipkart’s claims. Here’s why

Even as Flipkart is claiming that altering seller fees for certain categories and price ranges has made it the most low cost marketplace for sellers and claimed to be a favourite among the sellers, the latter doesn’t think so.

"When we reduced rate cards, we reduced fixed fee, shipping fee and collection fee and also offered a 10-20% discount for gold and silver (tier I and II category) sellers," Nishant Gupta, director of marketplace, Flipkart, told ET.

Flipkart stated 60-65% sellers across different categories passed on the benefit to consumers with reduced prices and are seeing a 25% jump in sales.

"Sellers we have interacted with have confirmed our assessment of it (the change affecting on cost of doing business). Gold sellers will be earning a lot more on Flipkart now," Gupta told ET.

However, sellers said Flipkart still remained costlier than Amazon.

"They have reduced prices for very few categories and for a specific price range. Even with that, Flipkart was minimum 10-15% costlier than Amazon (before the latter's fee change)," an E-commerce Sellers Association of India spokesperson, a group of about 1,500 online merchants, told ET, adding “With the current fee revision from Amazon effective from May 18, the marketplace fee deduction of Amazon and Flipkart will be comparable."

Some sellers are unhappy with Amazon's fee structure change too, with a group writing to founder Jeff Bezos.

"We are very competitive in terms of overall cost of doing business for the seller," said Gupta of Flipkart.

"It is our constant endeavor to remain the most competitive marketplace in India. We are confident our sellers look at the aggregate cost of doing business on our platform and compare that with the overall value they derive out of our platform,” Amazon spokesperson told ET.