Seeking a strategy for e-commerce exports focus on MSMEs to help them sell their products to global markets, the industry body FISME in a study paper has said that e-commerce export potential is in the range of $200 to $300 billion by 2030.

The industry stakeholders in an interactive session after the release of the study paper called for sensitisation of customs department to the high value of returns, about 30 per cent of the total shipments, on products sold through e-commerce platforms. 

“The Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) 2023 released end-March 2023 has laid special emphasis on giving a fillip to e-commerce exports and MSME exports. The huge gap between these estimates and the actual situation requires concerted action on the part of exporters, platform owners and the Government. Over 90 per cent of e-commerce exporters in India are MSMEs (most of them micro and small enterprises). Hence a strategy for e-commerce exports must focus on MSMEs,” said Anil Bhardwaj, Secretary General, Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises (FISME).

FISME and IKDHVAJ Advisers LLP in their research report called for policy steps required to increase Business to Consumer (B2C) e-commerce exports from India. “E-commerce exporters and within them particularly the MSMEs, face two types of concerns, those faced by conventional or offline exporters and others only by online exporters. E-commerce exports face a relatively higher extent of returns of the product sold. At present, returns are in general treated as imports (primarily because of problems in identifying the returned product as the originally exported product) and thus subject to full import duties. In many cases, the logistics costs of bringing returns back to India are very high and the products are either sold at a huge discount in the country exported to or discarded,” added Bhardwaj. He also stated that E-commerce exporters also do not know when their product will be sold, or the discounts needed for enabling sales.  This often leads to problems in reconciliation of the payments received with the shipping bill of exports, he stated.