Amazon wants to encourage sellers on its platform to focus more on their local markets to deliver products cheaper and faster to customers and is looking to push certain categories such as apparel and grocery.
The local unit of the American ecommerce giant brought about several changes to its seller fee structure, making it cheaper for sellers to ship locally so as to increase delivery speed and induce more customer buying, while increasing costs for regional and national shipping.
Amazon reduced the fees for selling on the platform by up to 70% in categories such as daily essentials and apparel but increased those by up to 50% for items like shoes, home improvement accessories, powerbanks and charges. Overall, the fees will increase for 24 categories and fall for 32. There will be no change in 48 categories, including mobiles, laptops, books and small appliances.
In a bid to push groceries, the seller fees in the category have been reduced to 3% from 7%, as the company takes on Alibaba-backed Big-Basket and Flipkart which is entering the space. The company is also evidently giving a push to its fashion category, where Amazon lags behind the Flipkart group, by reducing seller fees in apparel to 17% from 19.5%.
Amazon said the new rates would apply to all sellers on the marketplace but did not comment on Cloudtail and Appario, two sellers in which Amazon has a stake.
Sellers said both Flipkart and Amazon had been changing fee structures over the past few years to keep their rates on par so as to not lose merchants to the other. Flipkart in November lowered commissions by 5% for items priced below Rs 300 in many categories, in a bid to encourage sellers to offer their products at lower prices.
“Both platforms have been benchmarking seller fees and even bringing in similar features for product returns and reconciliation,” said a fashion seller, requesting anonymity.
Amazon has 3 lakh sellers selling 160 million products across 104 categories on its Indian platform. Some of the biggest changes in referral fees are in the categories impacting environment, said Gopal Pillai, head for seller services at Amazon India. The fee for garden solar devices has been reduced to 5% from 12%, while that for LED bulbs and batteries has been lowered to 3% from 11%.
The company cut the shipping fee within city limits under its Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) category to Rs 24 per item (first 500 grams) from Rs 28. At the same time, it increased the rate for shipping within the region to Rs 32 from Rs 28 and beyond that to Rs 55 from Rs 50. The fee has also been cut for the next 500 grams for local shipping under FBA.
Amazon wants to push sellers to sell their products at lower rates and has significantly changed the fixed closing fees levied on sellers for costs related to payment processing, hardware and towards other factors.
For EasyShip, wherein Amazon picks up the product directly from the seller, the closing fee has been cut to Rs 2 from Rs 10 for products priced below Rs 250, and to Rs 5 from Rs 10 for those priced Rs 251-500.
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