Govt wants ‘origin of products’ displayed, calls e-commerce firms for meet

This follows the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) platform making it mandatory for its listed sellers to specify the country of origin while registering all new products on the portal

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has called e-commerce majors, including Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm, for a meeting on Wednesday to discuss the ‘displaying origin of the product’ on these platforms, as anti-China sentiment picks up in the country. This follows the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) platform making it mandatory for its listed sellers to specify the country of origin while registering all new products on the portal.

The border stand-off between India and China has sparked a campaign here that is gaining momentum to boycott Chinese products.The meeting is being organised on a video conferencing platform, according to people in the know. Ministry officials said that this issue has come up earlier and implementation issues for e-marketplaces would be discussed at the meeting on Wednesday. Among other invitees to the discussion are Pepperfry and The E-commerce Council of India.

E-commerce executives said asking sellers to fill up information about ‘country of origin’ for new listings of products is not complicated. However, the challenge is that the millions of existing products already listed on the e-commerce platforms don’t have those details and it would be a very “time consuming” process for the sellers to mark the country of origin for those products. However, for some products, this information is already available…Read More

Five major reasons could be assigned to the demise of the Flipkart-Snapdeal deal

Something did not go right on the weekend of July 29/30. There was an important meeting scheduled between Snapdeal-Flipkart deal for Monday, July 31, which was canceled. This sounded the death knell of the merger deal between the two e-commerce giants. Earlier on July 26, the board of Jasper, the holding company of Snapdeal, had given a go-ahead to continue negotiations for a Snapdeal sale to Flipkart, based on an enhanced buyout offer of $850 million by Flipkart two weeks earlier.

Five major reasons could be assigned to the demise of the deal.

1. Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal - the two founders were always opposed to the deal. In the days and weeks preceding the calling off of the deal, Kunal had managed to persuade some of the important board members on his vision of a Taobao and Rakuten like market place, which he called Snapdeal 2.0. Patterned on Alibaba’s Taobao and eBay, Kunal apparently convinced his Board that Snapdeal 2.0 would be an asset-light, local market place which would be much easier for sellers to sell on. The company would shed significant weight, go down from the existing 1,200 employees to perhaps 300 employees in the new avatar. The new Snapdeal would not any longer be into the competitive one-day-two-day delivery system, but would focus on operational efficiencies of its sellers, focusing on cost efficiencies. Basically, what Kunal must have told his board was that the acquisition of eBay by Flipkart had left a void in the ‘market-place’ space in India where the e-commerce entity merely acts as the mall, allowing sellers to open their own outlets, and therefore, playing the role of a destination and real estate owner only. Alibaba in China has perfected this model through Taobao. Bahl sold Snapdeal 2.0 as the Taobao of India.

2. Some of Snapdeal’s minority shareholders, including Azim Premji had protested and opposed the proposed pay outs under the Flipkart deal to Nexus Venture Partners, Kalaari Capital and to the Snapdeal founders, Kunal and Rohit. Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal were likely to receive $30 million in cash each from SoftBank after their exit from the company. Kalaari and Nexus were to receive $60 million from SoftBank, in addition to equity in Flipkart. This special treatment to select shareholders, orchestrated by SoftBank to buy their peace, irked other shareholders....

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Why are Indians boycotting Snapchat? Everything you need to know

People mistakenly uninstalled Snapdeal instead of Snapchat

 

Snapchat has been in the news for all the wrong reasons over the weekend ever since CEO Evan Spiegel allegedly claimed that he is not interested in expanding the platform's user base in 'poor countries like India and Spain'. 

This lead to a huge uproar in India, especially on social media forums. People not only ridiculed Snapchat for the remarks but also began a boycott campaign on Twitter and began to uninstall the app on their phones. Here is what exactly happened.

According to a report published in Variety, the CEO while discussing expansion plans in a meeting allegedly dismissed an employee's concern of the slow growth rate of the app in India, stating that the app was only meant for 'rich people'.

As reported earlier, According to one of the employees, Spiegel had during a meeting said, "This app is only for rich people. I don't want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain." It is rumoured that this comment was made by Spiegel in 2015.

After reports of Spiegel's alleged claims of Snapchat being a 'rich people's app' surfaced, Indian users took to Twitter to express their dissent over the comment. 

Hashtags like #BycottSnapchat and UnistallSpachat were trending on Twitter.

Soon after Variety published the alleged comment, the app's ratings on Google play store and other such platforms witnessed a sharp decline, a 4.4 to a 3.6 rating. Furthermore, the number of one-star rating by the users shot up from 39,102 to 192,906 in just 24 hours.

Others took action on the Apple App store, driving the ratings of the App to one star and bombarding it with sarcastic reviews.| READ MORE...

Snapdeal orders mass lay-off; FreeCharge to be sold for $300 mn

Founders forego salary

Once a success story of the burgeoning start-up ecosystem, Gurgaon-based online marketplace Snapdeal on Wednesday said it would cut more jobs, stop paying its founders and sell its digital wallet FreeCharge.

Co-founder Kunal Bahl, in an email to employees on Wednesday, finally accepted tough decisions— including letting go of people and a full pay cut for him— are being taken. It has also put on sale FreeCharge and is in talks with Naspers, the South Africa-based internet group, to sell it for $300 million.

“We are combining teams, reducing layers, eliminating non-core projects and strengthening the focus on profitable growth. Sadly, we will also be saying really painful goodbyes to some of our colleagues in this process. This is, by far, the hardest decision we have ever taken,” said Bahl.

Though the company refused to divulge the exact number of people to be sacked, sources close to the development said 800 employees would be laid off over the next few days. Sources confirmed 100 were asked to go on the day itself, within a few minutes of Bahl’s email.

“By the time we finished reading the mail, HR (human resource) called us to their office. They said we would get three months of severance pay. We said yes, as that was the only option on the table,” said an employee who was sacked on Wednesday.

According to sources, employees from marketing, ad-tech, category, digital marketing, engineering team, catalogues, have all been asked to leave. Bahl and his co-founder Rohit Bansal said they will not take pay henceforth.

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