Over a dozen small sellers have exited or suspended their accounts on Amazon since they were unable to manage deliveries and logistics on their own, after the new FDI in e-commerce policy came into effect on February 1, reports the Economic Times. MediaNama has reached out to Amazon, CAIT and Swadeshi Jagran Manch, and will update this when we hear from them. The new regulations disallow entities owned by e-commerce players to sell on the platform, in order to ensure a level playing field between all sellers/retailers. This has led to Amazon-owned Cloudtail and Appario suspending their operations. In the past few days, Amazon's Echo speakers disappeared from the platform, then appeared again, Amazon Basics products disappeared, and Amazon Pantry emptied out (but was live in under a week). Most orders for smaller sellers were fulfilled by these entities, but they've not received any direction or guidelines from Amazon about what would happen now, per the report. Both Cloudtail and Appario still sell via Amazon Business, but smaller retailers banked on them for back-end support, order processing, returns, etc. Dumping stake in own brands According to ET, Amazon may convert Cloudtail and Appario into wholesale entities carrying out B2B transactions to align itself with the new FDI in e-commerce regulations. Both will then sell to third-party vendors who will then sell to consumers. Amazon is reportedly in the process of identifying preferred sellers. However, another Amazon executive told ET that the company had not given up the idea of offloading its…
