Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: The e-commerce portal of Khadi and Village Industry Commission (KVIC) has registered gross online sales worth over Rs 1.12 crore within eight months of its operations. The online portal, launched on July 7, 2020, has delivered over 1 lakh products to more than 10,000 customers out of the 65,000 visitors to the portal as of February 26, 2021, KVIC said on Saturday. The average online purchase value during the eight-month period was Rs 11,000 per customer “which is an indication of Khadi’s ever-growing popularity and the diversity of its product range to suit all segments of buyers,” KVIC said in a statement. The highest individual sale was worth Rs 1.25 lakh while khadi masks, honey, herbal soaps, grocery, spices, fabric, agarbatti were bestselling categories.
Importantly, KVIC had announced the full launch of the portal on New Year’s Day 2021 after running it in beta mode since July. “Currently, it is being managed by KVIC itself while the new marketplace will be operated by a franchisee. The beta portal has done well as we were able to serve more than 22,000 customers so far,” Saxena had told Financial Express Online in December ahead of the full launch of the portal that is likely to cross Rs 2 crore in turnover by end of the current financial year 2020-21.
Also read: SIDBI expands state-wise MSME programme to Andhra Pradesh; these benefits for small businesses on anvil
Saxena noted in the statement that all expenses incurred on operating the portal are borne by KVIC even as “in case of other e-commerce sites, product cataloguing, packaging, and dispatch are the responsibility of the respective sellers.” Since KVIC has a policy that the Khadi institutions and PMEGP units are exempted from any such financial and logistical burden, this saves them a lot of money, he added. KVIC said that it had received orders from all 31 states and union territories.
KVIC had last year cracked down on fake khadi products being sold on e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, and others as claimed by the commission. According to KVIC, it had forced such marketplaces to remove more than 160 web links selling products in the brand name of Khadi. KVIC had stated then that it had sent legal notices to more than 1,000 firms using Khadi India brand name to sell fake products and “thus causing damage to its reputation and the loss of work to Khadi artisans,” according to its statement.