CCI asks for transparency in Indian e-commerce

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Nov 6, 2019

The Competition Commission of India plans to create advisory guidelines for e-commerce businesses operating in India to encourage transparency and decide when deep discounting practices are appropriate. 

The CCI is in the process of deciding whether the country’s e-commerce platforms have become large enough to be forbidden from using deep discounting practices, the organisations’ chairman  Ashok Kumar Gupta told ET Bureau. The organisation is also separately creating guidelines to increase transparency.

“The advisory will be more to do with transparency,” Gupta told EY Bureau. “Can they be more forthright?”

The organisation has received complaints that e-commerce businesses are not clear about how they operate online. Gupta also told ET Bureau that the CCI is looking into deep discounting in order to decide whether or not to prevent large e-commerce businesses from repeatedly selling products at below the cost price. The CCI has stated that deep discounting can be used as a tool to create a customer base when a business enters the market but it should not be consistently used after it has established itself. 

The CCI is not the only organisation scrutinising India’s e-commerce giants. The Confederation of All Indian Traders has not only deemed foreign owned Amazon and Flipkart’s business practices against the spirit of the law, it has arranged for a pan-India protest against the businesses that will begin this month and continue into 2020. The CAIT has met with the CCI to discuss the issue.