How Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart Continue to Skirt India’s E-Commerce Laws

Small businesses are left with no reprieve in sight unless JioMart changes things

In 1968, my grandfather set up a small hardware and electronics store, laying the foundation for a family business that grew and flourished over the next 50 years. But things have changed in the last couple of years. From thriving in competition, we’ve gone to just about surviving.

The problems faced by my family business are not much different from what small businesses and mom-and-pop stores around the world face: predatory pricing by deep-pocketed, e-commerce companies. Predatory pricing is a strategy in which dominant firms deliberately reduce prices to loss-making levels in the short term to force other players out of the market. It is considered anti-competitive because in the long run customers will have no option but to buy from the dominant players.

What enables companies to set predatory prices?

Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart have come a long way in India, capturing nearly 60 percent of the e-commerce market and slowly creeping in on the entire retail market.

In most countries where Amazon operates it not only facilitates a platform for…