Flipkart recently launched an in-house mystery shopper service, where its employees volunteer to search for online sellers who are carrying out fraudulent activities, which is severely hindering respectable genuine sellers. Great news! Flipkart has already started to achieve success with its endeavour.
"When an employee identifies to a fake product or non-genuine seller, he or she gets a cash award in the form of a voucher per identification," said Manish Maheshwari, VP and head of seller ecosystem at Flipkart.
Ahead of the Diwali sales, Flipkart is hoping that its strong stance on fakes and other negative selling tactics will increase confidence in buyers and sellers on the platform.
"The identified sellers were selling either fake products, defaulting on deliveries or stocking out rivals by buying out and then returning their products," said Maheshwari.
The ecommerce leader has built state-of-the-art software that can check if sellers are increasing the maximum retail price of a product and then promoting it at an exaggerated discounted price.
"Whenever a product image is uploaded with an inflated MRP, our inbuilt image search algorithms can detect whether MRP recorded in database with the uploaded MRP varies a lot. If it does, an alert is sounded against the seller," stated Maheshwari.
Some sellers are also buying out rivals stock and then returning the goods. This is not only decreasing the rival sellers online rating, but also destroying the competition, as the fraudulent seller can inflate the price of the in-demand product, which comes as a consequence of the illicit action.
"We don't offer cashbacks. But we have seen some sellers stock out rivals by just ordering and then returning their goods," remarked Maheshwari.
Customers have not only been complaining about fake goods being sold online, but also receiving undesirable objects like a brick in their parcel, instead of the ordered goods. To cut down on these nasty surprises which continue to re-surface on online marketplaces, Flipkart has decide to only let authorised re-sellers sell.
"A laptop or mobile phone can only be sold by authorized resellers of that brand," Maheshwari added.
Askmebazaar launched a zero-tolerance on fakes campaign recently and other ecommerce companies, including Snapdeal and Amazon have also taken heed of the situation.
It is heart-warming to see online marketplaces making an effort to improve the ecommerce eco-system for both buyer and seller by weeding out unscrupulous sellers.
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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