India’s largest marketplace, Flipkart, has drawn up a scheme to incentivise its sellers as it attempts to retain its customer base in the face of increasing competition from foreign e-commerce players.

Anil Goteti, Head, Marketplace for Flipkart, told BusinessLine that the company has launched a seller tiering programme to incentivise high-performing sellers on the platform.

Sellers under the programme will be entitled for various financial and support benefits to further grow and improve quality standards on the platform.

Under this new programme, sellers on Flipkart Marketplace, will be classified as Gold, Silver and Bronze, based on the overall consumer experience, performance and business scale of the sellers, across parameters like revenue, seller cancellations, breaches and returns.

The aim of the programme is to provide visibility that will help sellers measure their performance and take necessary steps to improve customer experience for better business growth.

Sellers providing good consumer experience at scale will be rewarded with attractive financial, growth and support benefits like discounts on shipping fee, faster payouts, better discover-ability, exclusive promotions, and priority seller support.

Some key modifications under the programme are — 20 per cent discounted shipping fee for Gold-tier and 10 per cent for Silver-tier sellers; incentivising pre-paid orders by making it cheaper for all sellers; priority seller support for Gold- and Silver-tier sellers; account management support for Gold-tier and Silver-tier sellers. The Gold-tier sellers will get payment within seven days and Silver-tier sellers, will get the payment in 10 days.

“We expect sellers to graduate to Silver and Gold tiers, and we want most of our sellers to be part of these tiers as it will lead to better consumer experience,” Goteti said.

Gold sellers will also get a priority seller support so that their issues are resolved faster. This is something which is quite unique to sellers in the Indian e-commerce space, Goteti said.

Most sellers on e-commerce platforms have formed online unions and have aired their grievances on social media, claiming that they get short-changed most of the time. This effort from Flipkart should address their issues, a sellers told this paper.

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