The Ministry of Consumer Affairs on Monday proposed amendments that give the existing Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 more teeth. The proposed changes include new rules to address abuse of FDI regulations, the establishment of a grievance redressal mechanism, new display and labelling criteria for foreign goods, the prohibition of flash sales, data protection for customers, among other things. These changes come in response to "several representations from aggrieved consumers, traders and associations complaining against widespread cheating and unfair trade practices being observed in the e-commerce ecosystem," the government stated in a press release. MediaNama has reached out to Flipkart and Amazon for comments and is awaiting a response. Read: Summary of the current E-Commerce Rules, 2020 Changes to address abuse of FDI regulations The Indian government’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policy outlines that e-commerce companies with FDI like Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart can only operate as marketplaces for third-party sellers and cannot operate an inventory-based model where they sell directly to customers. But brick-and-mortar retailers have accused Amazon and Flipkart of getting around this by setting up complex ownership structures and giving preference to a select group of sellers that are indirectly owned or controlled by them. Reuters in February reported that thirty-five sellers, Cloudtail one of them, accounted for two-thirds of Amazon’s sales in India. The agency’s reporting revealed how Amazon used legal manoeuvres to sidestep Indian regulations aimed at curbing deep discounting and limiting Foreign Direct Investment. The draft rules aim to address these issues by proposing the following: Related…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...