This festive season, GST to have no impact on online sales

With the festive season gearing up, the past few months, which saw relentless debates on the impact of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on the economy, seems to fade away with the plethora of sales on various e-commerce portals.

As the new taxation regime by the Modi-led government takes its place in the economy, senior VP-Categories of ShopClues, Nitin Kochhar believes that the GST impact was significant only in the month of July.

"Immediately post the rollout of GST on July 1, it settled down by August and the sales went back to normal by the beginning of September," Nitin Kochhar told ANI in an email interview.

However, he stated that there will be no impact of the GST on the sales or offers that are currently running on various e-commerce platforms, including ShopClues.

He also revealed that more focus is being given towards the Fashion and Lifestyle category during the sales, including a complete ramp up of the portfolio with better margins and the launch of exclusive labels. Also, technical innovations have been put in place to provide seamless customer experience.

"The platform has made major developments in terms of improving discovery, recommendations, personalisation, and search. The selection has also been majorly ramped up, across categories, so our consumers can find a large variety of products at the best prices. They can also rest assured about the quality as we have Surety marked products as part of the sale. The ShopClues Surety programme was launched in March 2017, which ensured that products go through a five-point quality check and assigned badges to the products to categorise them accordingly," he said.

"This year's best deals and discounts have been curated keeping the festive needs of ShopClues' value-driven consumers in mind, a majority of which are from Bharat - the tier II, III and beyond towns. Exclusive deals on electronics and accessories have been included, with price points starting at as low as Rs. 99," said co-founder and CBO ShopClues, Radhika Aggarwal.

Adding to this she said that the portal also ramped up their associations with top banks, portals and e-wallets, to enable a seamless and delightful shopping experience for our customers during this Diwali.