The government will hold a meeting with leading e-commerce marketplaces on Wednesday in order to persuade them to prominently display the ‘country of origin’ of products on their platforms, in a bid to curb imports from China.
The move to have Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and others display the ‘country of origin’ follows a mandate by the government’s own e-procurement portal Government e-Marketplace (GeM) for sellers to specify the ‘country of origin’ of goods.
“From a technical standpoint, exposing the field for ‘country of origin’ on our platform won’t be hard at all, and neither will it be to mandate that all new product listings must specify this,” said a senior e-commerce executive. “But what about the millions of product listings that exist on different platforms? Updating those will take time.”
Like with GeM, the onus of specifying the country of origin of goods will lie with sellers on the marketplace.
The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) could ask e-commerce marketplaces to enable the feature for all new product listings and might set a timeline for all existing listings to be updated over time, industry insiders told ET.
Another executive pointed out that the classification of sellers on e-commerce platforms, similar to the Class I and Class II Local Suppliers on GeM, based on the criteria of local content, is a “non-starter” for e-commerce sellers.
“Some of these brands procure raw materials locally, but those in fact might have been imported by their suppliers. It’s impossible for them to calculate local content,” the executive said.
On June 19, ET reported that the government could mandate e-commerce players to display the country of origin of goods via a requirement in the upcoming e-commerce policy.
Another person with knowledge of the developments said that the Department of Legal Metrology could update its rules, mandating the display of country of origin of products sold on e-commerce platforms, similar to how it mandates the display of maximum retail price and expiry date of consumable products.
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