CAIT To Launch Swadeshi Ecommerce App For Small Sellers To Take On Amazon, Flipkart

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which represents 8 Cr traders and 40,000 trade associations, has announced that it is going to launch a mobile app for its ecommerce portal Bharatemarket. The association aims to get more small traders to sell online more easily through smartphones.

It must be noted that CAIT had unveiled its ecommerce portal Bharatemarket back in May 2020, emphasising that the platform will be launched by June 2020. However, the website has not been launched to date. Talking to Inc42 in December 2020, CAIT’s national secretary general Praveen Khandelwal said that the launch of the platform was delayed due to technical difficulties and the ecommerce website would be up and running by 14-15 January 2021.  Now, the new launch date of Bharatemarket is March 11, 2021.

The association had also claimed that it has onboarded over 50K traders across India and was looking to get another 100K before the launch of the platform in January. In the recent press note, the association aims to sign up 7 Lakh (700K) sellers by the end of 2021 and cross 1 Cr (10 Mn) sellers by the end of 2023.

CAIT has partnered with the Startup India division of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) to plug millions of mom-and-pop or kirana shops across India to ecommerce. SME-focussed networking platform GlobalLinker is also providing core technology whereas All India Trader Welfare Association (AITWA) will be offering logistics support.

CAIT has clarified that the platform will be very different from the private ecommerce entities such as Amazon and Flipkart as it will focus on retailers and customers. The ecommerce platform will not charge any additional commissions or fees and transfer the traders’ earnings directly to them.

Besides this, the association has also highlighted that it will give no preferential treatment to vendors listed on the platform.  It will be built on a geotagging feature that will allow customers to place orders from the nearest store of their choice. Once the order is placed, it will take up to two hours for the traders to deliver the items.

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