CAIT to launch national e-commerce marketplace

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) on May 1 said it would soon launch a national e-commerce marketplace called bharatemarket for retail traders.

The portal would be powered by collaboration with several technology partners. The marketplace will integrate capabilities of technology companies to provide end to end services in the logistics and supply chains from manufacturers to consumers, including deliveries at home.

The e commerce portal will see participation from retailers and would be owned by the traders themselves to ensure privacy of consumers data.

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"The CAIT with initial hand holding of DPIIT, is launching this national e marketplace to bring 95 percent of retail trade of India comprising traders to bring on e commerce platform, where each trader on-boarding the platform, will be the shareholder and the portal will be run exclusively by the traders, of the traders and for the traders & consumers," said CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal.

Khandelwal said that the service has already been started as a pilot, initially with a limited number of essential commodities, in 6 cities – Prayagraj, Gorakhpur, Varanasi, Lucknow, Kanpur and Bengaluru.

"This has now grown to 90+ cities in a matter of two weeks. The learnings from the pilot will allow us to scale to many more locations and soon to categories beyond groceries," said Khandelwal.

The Ministry of Industry and Commerce (DPIIT) saw the initiative as a very effective way to get essential commodities to consumers during the lockdown period and within containment zones, he added.

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