Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: The enterprise-to-enterprise (B2B) e-commerce marketplace for government organisations and departments to procure goods from MSMEs in the nation has crossed the whopping 10-lakh-seller milestone inside 4-and-a-half years of its launch. The Government eMarketplace (GeM), as of January 27, 2020, listed 10,13,448 sellers and service providers across more than 13,000 item and 178 service categories, according to the information sourced from the marketplace. Launched on August 9, 2016, to improve speed and transparency in the public procurement approach for MSMEs, the marketplace has processed 55.74 lakh orders with the transaction worth crossing the Rs 80,000-crore mark. With the staggering seller base, GeM is arguably the biggest e-commerce marketplace in the nation.
Out of total sellers, the quantity of micro and compact sellers has also enhanced from more than 66,000 in January 2020 to more than 4.71 lakh in January 2021. This has led to a jump in their share from 22 per cent to 46. 5 per cent of the total seller count through the mentioned period. The worth of orders processed by these micro and compact sellers was 57.90 per cent at the time of filing this report.
GeM CEO Talleen Kumar didn’t straight away respond to the request for comments.
TheSpuzz Online had reported in December that GeM added 40,212 new sellers on an typical per month along with 486 new item categories every single month in 2020. Taking a cue from the development of the GeM portal, the government along with SBI has been working on launching the B2C e-commerce marketplace Bharat Craft for MSMEs to marketplace and sell their solutions in India and internationally comparable to platforms such as Amazon and Alibaba. The B2C marketplace would be competing with Flipkart, Amazon India, Snapdeal, and more private marketplaces and “should soon see turnover on the platform to the tune of Rs 10 lakh crore in the next few years,” MSME Minister Nitin Gadkari had at an occasion in 2019. Amazon at present has a seller base of about 7 lakh when Flipkart had reported more than 3 lakh sellers getting orders through the initial 3 days of its ‘The Big Billion Days’ sale final year.
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The government procurement from micro and compact enterprises, as per public procurement policy monitoring portal MSME Sambandh, as of January 27, 2020, was worth Rs 23,424 crore. The goods had been procured from more than 1.11 lakh MSEs when procurement from SC/ST and females-owned enterprises was worth Rs 446 crore and Rs 469 crore respectively. The all round procurement from government enterprises and departments in the economic year 2020-21 so far stood at Rs 73,933 crore.