Amazon India is accepting orders for kitchen utensils, flasks, induction cooktops among other goods, even as the government has not lent such items the ‘essential’ tag to make them more widely available to consumers amid the lockdown.
The company said it was a glitch after the government rolled back its decision to allow e-commerce players to sell non-essential items starting April 20. At the time, Amazon had said the government’s move would disappoint customers and sellers on its platform.
“In anticipation of the inclusion of non-essential items for ecommerce, we had begun the process of adding items to our selection. We have since removed all of non-essential items further to the order on April 19th. A few products may continue to show up erroneously due to the latency in the automation,” an Amazon spokesperson told ET. “These products are being manually taken down.”
This comes at a time when the e-commerce industry is seeking a broader list of essential items that can be shipped to consumer homes. Companies such as Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal say they are seeing high demand for products that enable work-from-home, personal grooming and for homeschooling kids.
Industry bodies CII and FICCI on Tuesday wrote to the secretaries of the Home Affairs and Consumer Affairs ministries asking them to include personal care products such as trimmers among the list of essentials. They said the products could be made available both offline and online.
“Our members (have) received several requests from common man seeking supply of Women and Men Hygiene products to their houses through…E-commerce,” FICCI wrote in a letter to Ajay Kumar Bhalla, Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, on Monday.
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