WS Retail, which was among the top sellers on home-grown e-commerce platform Flipkart until last year, posted losses of Rs 11.3 crore for the year ended March 2017, as against a profit of Rs 5.2 crore in FY16, according to filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) and research platform Tofler. Total revenues declined 67.3% to Rs 4,543 crore. This is for the first time that the retailer posted a loss since FY13, when it posted a profit of Rs 2 crore.
As email send to Flipkart and WS Retail did not elicit any response till the time of going to the press. It seems that WS Retail has got impacted by the March 2016 guideline of the government which prohibited e-commerce firms to source more than 25% of their total sales from a single seller.
WS Retail’s revenues from other incomes stood at just Rs 8 crore in FY17, compared with Rs 354.3 crore in FY16.
Both Flipkart and Amazon have its own sellers in WS Retail and Cloudtail, respectively. WS Retail was founded by Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal who had sold it to former OnMobile global CEO Rajeev Kuchhal and a clutch of other investors.