‘Make in India’ is a headline you’re likely to have seen smeared across newspapers or as campaign rhetoric. E-retailers in India were mandated to display the country of origin against all the products starting 1st August, 2020. The rationale behind this move was to provide the customer the information which would aid the government to accelerate their plans on curbing imports.  

To get an idea of the extent that this was followed, we looked at 29,000+ products on Amazon and 20,000+ products on Flipkart, across popular categories.

What our data revealed (illustrated in the chart above) is that Flipkart had updated the country of origin information for 91% of the products while Amazon had updated for only 56%. In categories like Grocery/ Cooking Essentials and Personal Care, Flipkart updated this information across 100% of products that we looked at. 

The chart above reveals interesting insights into the respective product mixes of Flipkart and Amazon. We narrowed our study to three categories that stood out; Electronics, Baby products and Men’s’ fashion. These are the categories we noticed that have the most number of products that are manufactured out of India. Apart from India, the largest manufacturer is China, where a lot of these products come from. Looking at this chart, we see that most of Flipkart’s products are manufactured in India, compared to its counterpart.

To sum up, we noticed that Flipkart has updated 91% of its products while Amazon has updated only 56% of their products of the products we tracked. 

With the heightened emphasis on Make in India and reducing imports, sellers importing from other countries might have to rethink how to replace the products they currently are sourcing with local products. This also provides an opportunity to the Indian manufacturers to produce popular products which are currently being imported.

We’ll now have to wait and watch over the coming months to see how things unfold for these retailers and the sellers.