India Wants to Ban Amazon Prime Day

The Indian government’s proposed rules would drastically change e-commerce by restricting flash sales, private label goods, and other anticompetitive practices

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I previously wrote in length about how Amazon and Flipkart are skirting India’s e-commerce laws by engaging in predatory pricing and hurting offline retailers and small sellers on their platform in the process.

My main argument in that piece was that Amazon and Flipkart repeatedly find their way around India’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policy, which outlines that e-commerce companies with FDI can only operate as marketplaces for third-party sellers and cannot operate an inventory-based model where they sell directly to customers.

I ended my piece with a rather unhopeful note, saying that the Indian government’s lackadaisical attitude towards enforcing its own e-commerce policy allows these companies to engange in anti-competitive practices and the only hope is in JioMart, which has the ability to change things and help smaller sellers.

I was wrong.

The government’s proposed amendments to e-commerce rules