Online retailer Amazon India has reduced both storages charges, along with seller fees across five categories. The recent move comes ahead of its festive season sale next month, to encourage vendors to stock more products.
Amazon has also lowered the commission paid by sellers up to 2% in categories like apparel, home, and electronic accessories.
Earlier, last month, Amazon’s rival Flipkart had slashed commision rates on low price categories, to attract more sellers.
As the festive season approaches, both the e-tailers are looking to strengthen its platform by attracting more sellers to provide more options for its customers.
Further, Amazon India has lowered the rates for its “Go Local” programme by at least 20%, to enable more sellers to place their inventory closer to their customers. This will further enable quicker deliveries, thereby enhancing customer experience.
Also, the drop in seller fees across categories like apparel will enable vendors to store more products and offer a wider selection to customers.
“These fee changes should reduce the cost of operation for the sellers so that they can offer a wide range of products at competitive prices to the customers,” Gopal Pillai, general manager of seller services at Amazon India, told ET. “Across the board, we are looking at everything from the seller’s perspective and passing on our benefits of scale and leverage to the seller.”
Amazon India has more than 3,80,000 sellers on its platform offering more than 170 million products. The platform is witnessing an addition of around 3,000 sellers every week, as the festive season approaches.
A group of online sellers, All India Online Vendors Association (AIOVA), representing more than 3,500 sellers, is looking to file a case against Amazon India, alleging “preferential treatment” towards larger sellers like Cloudtail and Appario, as per ET reports.
AIOVA is also seeking a restriction against these large sellers from taking part in the upcoming festive season sale.
Amazon might have to fix its ties with these sellers, in order to ensure a seamless festive season sale.