In a recent discussion, Latif Nathani, managing director of eBay India spoke about various issues like governments decision to allow 100 percent, as per FDI policy for online marketplace, Goods and Service Tax and ease of doing business.
Nathani said that the government has been taking good initiative by coming up with clarifications on FDI policy. I think that was a gopd step in right direction. But we still feel that it needs to be followed up in terms of fine tuning.
We are a marketplace but there is no single seller whose contribution on our platform is in single high digits. A cap of 25 percent is bit high. When a marketplace is going to get millions of sellers to sell on their platform, 25 percent cap gives an undue advantage to some companies. In terms of FDI policy we feel it is good.
The government should be focused and make sure that all marketplaces follow the rules. There are companies which are saying they are doing away with gross merchandise value or GMV and are looking for profitability which is a positive signal for the entire e-commerce industry. E-commerce is a new business and we should ensure that there is a healthy business.
Government should have a look once again on certain points. One is tax collection at source (TCS). We have suggested to the government that we are ready to give all the data to the relevant agencies. Take the data from us but it is a very complicated task for us to do TCS. If the purpose of GST is to remove bureaucracy and complexities then why should we introduce more difficulties.
It’s our request to the ministry on GST as eBay and part of industry groups like FICCI, IMI and NASSCOM and we are very active in giving feedback.
More than 25000 sellers including small sellers like a carpenter or a shawl producer contributed approx half billion dollar in foreign exchange. Foreign Trade Policy got announced last year but there were limits imposed on certain categories. The custom paperwork is still cumbersome process and there are lots of documents that needs to be filled which become difficult for small sellers.
It’s our request to make the paper work easy as a single page form which can act as an invoice, custom declarations etc. After all it supports Prime Minister’s Make in India initiative in a bigger way.
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