A little while ago, the India government initiated a crackdown against e-commerce portals in the country.

Now, it looks like they may specifically be targetting Chinese sellers, and you're online shopping could get much more expensive as a result.

In December, the Indian government expressed concerns that giants like Amazon and Flipkart were pushing out local traders by seriously undercutting their prices. As such, they put new foreign direct investment (FDI) regulations into place, banning ecommerce sites from selling products from companies they have an equity interest in. Essentially, they were ending partnered flash sales on smartphones in particular.

Now, Chinese sellers and suppliers have also come under the scanner. It seems the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has evidence that some of these international sellers are circumventing import duties on the goods they're selling. They're reportedly, instead of sold goods, marking the items they're bringing in as "gifts".

This is important because any gifts sent to an Indian citizen, up to a value of Rs 5,000, doesn't attract any taxes. There's also no limit on how many of these "gifts" a person can receive within a certain time period.

In a previous ET report, sources alleged that Chinese retailers like Club Factory, AliExpress and Shein were taking advantage of this loophole in order to avoid import duties. "Investigations revealed that at its peak anywhere around 2,00,000 orders were placed every day through Chinese e-commerce platforms in India which escaped any form of taxes, which are otherwise applicable on imports," one source said.

As such, where the customs department was the sole authority regarding product shipments, the post office has also be tasked with evaluating these kinds of "gifts". Additionally, the government has also recently made it mandatory for these Chinese e-commerce platforms to register in India, if they want to sell here.

The kicker now however is that these measures haven't proven enough to stop the tide, so the government is kicking things up a notch. They want to enforce a cap on the number of "gifts" that can be shipped to an Indian each year from abroad. And one way for them to monitor that is by forcing the linking of purchase receipts from e-commerce platforms to users' Aadhaar or passports.

So the long and short of it is that, firstly, you might not get as steep a discount as you've gotten used to on AliExpress. After all, if at least some of those sellers were using this method to avoid paying taxes, they're going to want to pass that expense on to you.

For another, apparently your online purchases might now be trackable. If there's syncing between your purchases and Aadhaar, that means a KYC form. And if that's the case there might eventually even be a database somewhere that stores the serial number and description of what you've bought for the last few months, if not longer -- and not just by the e-commerce portal.