On the 27th of May, a Civil Court in Mumbai issued an order restraining the e commerce giant Flipkart, from selling GOQii’s wearable products at large discounts. The restraint order came shortly after the Ratan Tata backed GOQii, issued a legal notice to Flipkart, saying they were facing a massive loss because of the huge discounts offered by Flipkart on GOQii’s products.
According to the legal notice filed by GOQii on the 18th of May, Flipkart was selling its products at a discount of 70% to 80% on the website, a practice which GOQii calls predatory pricing. Not only were these discounts going against the original agreement between GOQii and Flipkart, they are also violating foriegn investment policy in e commerce– since Flipkart is owned by Walmart.
In the issue notice against Flipkart, GOQii said because of this predatory pricing, a lot of their existing orders were also being cancelled. The wearable products manufacturer said its partners were not happy with the lowering of the prices as a result of which their profits were being slashed as well. Partners like Croma and other distributors are extremely unhappy with GOQii right now and are not taking any further orders.
Before the restraint order was filed against Flipkart, the e commerce platform responded to the allegations and said the complaints were baseless. Walmart owned Flipkart said the sales of the products were declining not because of their pricing policy, but because of the nature of the products.
In response to this, Vishal Gondal (founder and CEO of GOQii) said, “We urge Flipkart/Walmart to not use its position of dominance to compromise SMEs/startups. Such practices are not in the best interest of the ecosystem. Deep discounting continues to hurt GOQii business.”
This is not the first time a complaint like this was filed against Flipkart . In the year 2017, similar issues of predatory pricing were also brought to the attention of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) and the Competition Commission of India (CCI) by the All India Online Vendors’ Association. Even though GOQii had issued the legal notice, Flipkart refused to stop the discounts. Hence, with no other way out, the GOQii had to go to court.
In its order, the Mumbai Civil Court and Sessions Court said it was necessary to place this restraint order in an attempt to level the playing field and to reduce the amount of damages incurred by GOQii.
Stay tuned for more updates.
Qhragraz
May 23, 2025 at 6:44 pm
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