Ikea has spent five years in India, and its flagship store in Hyderabad is turning a year old. Now,  it’s time for its debut in the country’s financial capital, Mumbai, according to Peter Betzel, the Swedish furniture retailer’s Managing Director in India. An announcement is expected within the next few days, according to another source. “While the Navi Mumbai store is getting ready, our focus now is to launch e-commerce in Mumbai very shortly, to be able to meet as many Mumbaikars sonner.” Betzel told Business Insider in an exclusive interview.

Publication : Business Insider

Date : August 7, 2019

Food delivery and restaurant discovery platform Zomato has laid-off around 70-100 employees in its customer support team at its office in Gurgaon, as the company looks to cut costs and reduce redundancies across its food delivery business, said three people aware of the development. Zomato confirmed the development. It said that the lay-offs were carried out due to redundancies in its current customer support workforce. “Over the last few months, our service quality has improved, and the percentage of orders requiring support have come down significantly creating a small number of redundancies for 1.2% of our workforce.

Publication : Livemint

Date :  August 7, 2019

E-commerce has been primarily unregulated and the government has worked to bring every aspect of its operations under its legal framework. The creation of guidelines on consumer protection was one of the last aspects of the draft National e-commerce Policy proposed in February.The government has proposed that e-commerce companies should abide by a 14-day deadline for refund requests. Besides, it wants e-commerce retailers to disclose details of sellers, protect “personally identifiable information of customers (under the provisions of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008) and have a defined procedure for redressal of consumer complaints.

Publication : Moneycontrol

Date : August 7, 2019

Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google defended their business practices to U.S. lawmakers conducting a broad antitrust inquiry, seeking to underscore their companies face stiff competition in their respective industries. Amazon, for example, argued that much of the data it keeps regarding third-party merchants who use its online marketplace is public and that analyzing aggregate sales data to bolster its private-label strategy is a common practice in the retail industry. “Customers’ shopping behavior in our store is just one of many inputs to Amazon’s private-label strategy,” David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general counsel

Publication : Yahoo News

Date : August 8, 2019

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) will take a call on India’s position on data localisation, considering its strategic and security aspects, even as it asked for fresh consultations on the proposed Personal Data Protection Bill. While the commerce and industry ministry had called for strict data localisation norms in its draft e-commerce policy, the electronics and information technology ministry is working on the Personal Data Protection Bill and has become the nodal agency for all data-related matters.Separately, the Reserve Bank of India has clarified that a copy of domestic data can be stored abroad in the case of cross-border transactions.

Publication : The Economic Times

Date : August 8,  2019