CAIT to launch mobile app for vendors

NEW DELHI: The Confederation of all India Traders (CAIT) on Tuesday said it will launch a mobile app for its e-commerce portal Bharatmarket to on-board smaller traders.

Scheduled to be launched on 11 March, CAIT said, Bharatemarket is "a truly revolutionary ‘phygital’ model combining the best of physical offline retail with the most modern digital technology, purely of the traders, by the traders and for the traders and consumers."

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CAIT represents a massive 8 crore traders across 40,000 trade associations in India. The domestic retail market is largely dominated by local traders that sell everything from mobiles to clothes and groceries through small-format stores.

But consumer pivot to e-commerce, accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, has been prompting both small and large players to get better at online sales and speedy deliveries.

The consumer on-boarding application will also be launched soon, CAIT said.

Bharatemarket aims to onboard 7,00,000 sellers onto the platform by the end of 2021, and 1 crore sellers by 31 December, 2023.

“The Bhartiya and Swadeshi platform will provide an equal level playing field to India’s 8 crore traders to compete ethically with foreign multinational giants who have distorted India’s e-commerce space with their malpractices. Bharatemarket is a unique e-commerce platform where traders will now have the opportunity to digitally serve their old established customers with whom they have been doing business for years,” CAIT said in a statement.

Bharatemarket will reach every Indian household and provide goods and services at affordable rates, it added.

CAIT has long been vocal about creating a seller-focused platform as it seeks to build an alternative to existing marketplaces--such as global retail giants such as Amazon and Walmart-backed Flipkart--which, it says, indulge in predatory pricing, loss funding, deep discounting, inventory control, among others.

"Time has now come for every brick and mortar retailer of the country to realise their true strength and harness their capabilities to jump on to the digital bandwagon and leverage the real potential of India’s burgeoning consumerism," it added.