In a bid to check fraudulent practices by sellers, Flipkart has instituted a “Mystery Shopping” team and found several malpractices including,
a) Supply of substandard products
b) Selling of Counterfeit products
c) Buying out competitor’s products and returning them
d) Buying own inventory to benefit from cash back offers
The exercise carried out over a period of 6 months resulted in about 250 sellers being black listed. Feedback were taken on about 600 sellers. Some of them were guilty of inefficiency in the form of wrong labeling or packaging and are being given training to improve their performance.
It is said that there are about 85000 sellers on the platform. It is understood that Paytm has blacklisted around 3000 sellers last year and similar exercise is done by other E-Commerce agencies as well.
Recently, three persons were arrested in Nagpur for floating an entire e-commerce website along with a payment gateway to defraud the public through fake transactions. (Refer Article in TOI here).
Fake websites in the Government sector have also been used to defraud Netizens. (Refer Article here)
It was therefore natural that frauds do take place in the platform of reputed e-commerce players both by sellers and even some buyers.
Flipkart and other E Commerce players need to therefore be ever on the vigil to check such malpractices.
Naavi
