An Ahmedabad-based seller has sent legal notice to e-commerce firm Meesho recently, alleging unfair trade practice. 

According to the notice, which was reviewed by businessline, most of the sellers’ order deliveries have been met with a return request citing reasons like damaged or wrong products. However, when the returned products reach the seller, the products are not damaged. 

The seller alleges that courier partners in between delivery are neglecting their duties and sellers have to bear the loss and trouble for this practice. Further, the seller is also not able to directly track the customer who placed the return request as those exact details are not shared.

‘mental harassment’

The notice added that this practice has caused “immense mental harassment to the seller” and asked the company to come up with a proper resolution of the issue like refund of the damaged product and strict action against courier partners. 

Commenting on this development, a Meesho spokesperson said, “As a marketplace, our aim is to provide the best experience for our sellers. We are continuously evaluating feedback from our sellers to improve their experience on the platform. We are driving higher accountability within the ecosystem by allowing sellers to choose their preferred logistics provider. Since we undertook this initiative in January, we have seen approvals by logistics partners doubling and seller claims reducing by 30 per cent.”

Meesho has rolled out a set of new policies in January wherein, sellers can choose their preferred courier partner for order returns based on their specific needs, among other things. Sellers are given various parameters and metrics like ‘Average Return Time’, ‘Costing’ and ‘Claims Raised’ of the courier partners to make this decision.

Increased delivery issues

Following this change in late January, Meesho sellers protested against the increased number of wrong deliveries and low claim acceptance rate on Meesho for the last 30 days. While customers get their refund amount when they return the wrong order package, sellers say they neither receive the correct product back nor are they able to claim compensation for the lost product. Meesho has reported 91 crore orders on the platform in 2022, which is a 135 per cent year-on-year(y-o-y) growth for the company. The company also said it had 140 million annual transacting users as of December 2022.  

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