Flipkart Bans 250 Sellers Through its ‘Mystery Shopping’ Exercise

Even the biggest e-commerce giants are plagued by fraud sellers and it comes as no surprise that Flipkart started an initiative to identify and blacklist them.

As a part of the Mystery Shopping initiative, started last year, Flipkart has blacklisted nearly 250 sellers from its website. These sellers were either identified as fraud or found to be selling poor quality products and offered no good after sales service to customers.

Background of ‘Mystery shopping’

Mystery shopping is definitely not a new activity and has been around for quite some time now. Multiple online and offline retail stores have been trying to incorporate this initiative to catch infamous sellers through their own portal.

It is exactly like how a spy works and identifies the substandard culprits around. Flipkart did the very same thing last year by picking a few of its employees to be a part of the initiative. Launched six months back, around 300 employees were identified to catch such sellers on its website.

By shopping on the website, these employees could undergo the same process as any other customer in India and verify if the sellers were selling substandard products or cheating the customer as a whole.

Outcome of the initiative

Flipkart received feedback of around 600 sellers, out of which necessary action was taken on 500. Further, Flipkart has blacklisted nearly 40-50% of these identified sellers, with no rights to sell its products on Flipkart from here on. To give you perspective, Flipkart has about 85,000 sellers registered on its portal.

Employees discovered that most of the reported sellers were either selling poor quality products and no promising on the desired quality, or they were delaying the delivery dates. Some sellers were also not packaging the precise products and tampered with the price labels.

Flipkart has done the right thing and taken responsibility to weed out the negatives from its seller database. Such things only hamper with the growth of the organisation and spoil the name of such big brands.

The way forward for Flipkart

We know for a fact that the sellers will keep coming back in different forms and try to bypass all rules in place at Flipkart. They will have to keep their checks strict and ensure no fraudsters traverse the limit.

There are also cases where a seller buys its own products to increase ratings and dissuade the public. While some sellers also try to falsely inflate their ratings and then sell substandard quality products to customers.

The teams at Flipkart are working hard to identify other methods to remove such sellers from its platform. Amazon and Paytm are already leading this space by blacklisting more than 1000 sellers on their platforms.

If you’re a regular customer of Flipkart, you might be knowing what I’m talking about. Hopefully in a year or two, such problems at Flipkart would reduce to a minimum, unlike today.