Flipkart blacklists 40 sellers to boost performance

To improve the shopping experience on its platform, India’s leading marketplace Flipkart has blacklisted almost 40 sellers, through its mystery shopping network of 60 employees, established this month. The network identified sellers who were either selling fake goods or not delivering the products or even buying products from their rivals only to return them later.

The company boasts of almost 60,000 sellers on the platform, with about 20,000 sellers alone from Delhi followed by cities such as Surat, Bangalore and Mumbai. The company has also invested in designing computer algorithms to catch fraudulent sellers. In its recently concluded app-only ‘Big Billion Sale’, Flipkart claims to have sold products worth Rs 1,800 crores in five days, compared to Rs 600 crores worth of goods sold during last year's sale event.

The company offers facilities such as training, services by ecommerce partners and help to get working capital loans from non-banking finance companies to its sellers. Flipkart has set a target of reaching 10 billion dollars (over Rs 64,000 crores) in gross merchandise value in 2016 and reaching 100 billion dollars by 2020 (Rs six lakh crores).