Funds are flowing from all corners in the ecommerce market. But the situation of small sellers and micro-enterprises hasn’t improved much as they still face financial crunch. Just like delayed salary shakes a common citizen’s monthly budget, similarly delayed payments leaves online vendors in the lurch.
Constant flow of money is required to keep the wheels of business rolling. Etailers and sellers who have financial backing can continue to do business with the help of reserved funds. However SMEs and micro-entrepreneurs rely heavily on payments of their previous sales. Delay in which affects their immediate operations and future production and sales.
Such delays can be caused due to long billing & payment cycle, product return & exchange, and lack of cohesiveness between payment teams of a marketplace. A typical payment cycle falls between a week to a couple of months but a lot of depends on confirmed delivery and final acceptance of the order.
What adds to the sellers’ woes is the alarming rise in fraud buyers. In such cases, a fraud customer swaps the original product with something else and demands refund or exchange. So an online vendor not only ends up losing the product and payment but also has to bear the cost of packaging, shipping and reverse pickup! All this after a long wait for payment.
A marketplace can survive only with the support of buyers and sellers. While for buyers there are deals, discounts and quick delivery, for sellers a provision for quick payments is required. Especially when all the major marketplaces, be it Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon or Paytm are looking to sign-up more sellers.
Real-time tracking and transparency in the payment process is the need of the hour so that online vendors can keep a track of their hard earned money. Also a system should be introduced that can eliminate or at least reduce fraud buyers. If sellers from their end can record the packaging process with product & customer details clearly visible, then it can help to filter fraud cases and handle it appropriately.
Editor team is specialized in introducing the marketplace content targeting the Indian online sellers. They plan and coordinate to bring the appealing content for the small businesses on how to partner with the e-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart and strategies for improving their online business.
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