Amazon India has temporarily shut down the Platinum Seller Program (PSP). Now they will not renew the contract of the top sellers until there in clarity on Goods and Service Tax (GST) regulations for sellers across different categories. PSP is a growth-oriented programme, where sellers are asked to meet certain metrics and sales targets. To be a part of PSP, various criterion includes the inventory in top-selling categories, history of selling, customer experience and volume, apart from the condition that the seller will never run out of inventory at a given point of time.
While Amazon India is not renewing the one-year contracts immediately, in that case Cloudtail India which is a joint venture between Amazon.com and Infosys has emerged as the sole Platinum seller.
One of the platinum seller on this announcement said “The company has conveyed to us that the renewals are on hold due to clarity on GST. There will be a single tax under GST, the benefits of which will be passed on to the merchant and to the buyer in terms of pricing. Hence, Amazon is trying to understand whether there is a need for differential standards. Even the sellers are confused and do not know what margins to quote as the impact of GST is still not clear”.
The delay in the renewal of PSP has impacted the business of many sellers as they are exempted from logistics cost and required to pay considerably lower fixed fee to the marketplace per sale.