NEW DELHI: Jaipur-based Aaviriti Jain, an online seller of jewellery, fondly recalls her stint as a seller on fashion portal Exclusively. in. She had her own space for Dhora, the brand under which she sells, and had built up a loyal customer base. But things changed when Exclusively.in was acquired by Snapdeal in February 2015. “All the hard work was lost as we became part of a bigger marketplace. On Exclusively.in we were able to operate our way, while on Snapdeal we were lost. Snapdeal killed our brand,” says Jain.Jain had to compete with more sellers and start all over again to build a presence. But what she went through may be set to play out once again, with the probable sale of Snapdeal to Flipkart. On April 10, Flipkart acquired eBay.in while raising a whopping $1.4 billion from eBay , Microsoft and Tencent.For Sanjay Thakur, president of the eSellers Suraksha Forum, what is worrisome is that this impending consolidation may leave no pure marketplace in India's $12-billion ecommerce market with about 10 million regular online shoppers."On Amazon and Flipkart, Cloud tail and WS Retail are among the larger sellers. We will be competing with other vendors and also these sellers. That's not going to be easy as the power shifts to platforms and choice for sellers reduces," says Thakur, who also runs online seller CyberStar, which he claims has monthly electronics sales of about 6 crore across multiple sites.Sandeep Kohli, who quit his job at Citibank to become an online seller of footwear and fashion accessories, is concerned about the rapid consolidation in ecommerce. “With fewer players, we will have to fight with more sellers for visibility. Earlier, we had a choice, now that seems to be shrinking to just three or four companies,” says Kohli, founder of Delhi-based Basement Bazaar, which sells on Amazon and Snapdeal, among other marketplaces.Sandeep Ladda, ecommerce lead at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), says, “With consolidation, competition is moving towards a duopoly. For sellers, this is a mixed bag as traffic shifts to two main players; on the other hand, they can plan logistics and supply chain better.”Sriwatsan Krishnan, principal, Bain & Company India, sees the current consolidation as a consequence of larger, better capitalised players with solid business models snapping up players with unclear differentiation and severe cash crunch. “Five years on, we should see the top three taking 60-70% share, but there is enough room for a clutch of smaller verticallyorganised players (in furniture, home improvement, high-end fashion and other segments) to thrive. This is similar to most international markets today, where niche players have carved out 30-40% of the market,” says Krishnan.Across the country, thousands of sellers are part of multiple ecommerce sites, including Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm, Snapdeal, Shopclues, eBay. They see consolidation shrinking the marketplace and the choice for them. Tomorrow, if they don’t like policies of Flipkart, then the Snapdeal option may not exist.The main concern is that there won’t be another large, pure marketplace they can go to. Second, at 3,00,000-plus, Snapdeal has the largest seller base, which may soon be part of another marketplace. Amazon has 1.7 lakh sellers and Flipkart has more than 1 lakh.Take, for example, the Nehru Place, Delhibased Softek Surya, a brick and mortar seller of mobile phones and electronics which went online and expanded to sell towels, bedsheets and home furnishing. Snapdeal accounted for 40% of its sales, selling Rs 2.5 crore worth of electronics and home furnishing products every month. Now, Softek promoter Dinesh Chopra may have to look for other options. He has already pulled out most of his inventory from Snapdeal.The third challenge is that sellers will have to fight for space not only with other sellers, but also compete with the platform itself when they opt for any of the limited number of online malls.Cloudtail is the largest seller on Amazon; in the year ended March 3016, it had sales of `4,591 crore, slightly higher than brick and mortar retailer Shoppers Stop’s consolidated revenues of Rs 4,582 crore. WS Retail is even larger; the top seller on Flipkart had sales of Rs 13,566 crore in 2015-16.WS Retail, though, is a standalone legal entity, not a part of Flipkart. A Flipkart spokesperson says, “As India’s leading marketplace, we have over 1,00,000 sellers on our platform. All our sellers, including WS Retail, are independent entities, with no relationship with Flipkart beyond the working partnership between a seller and a platform.”A seller, on condition of anonymity, says, “Competing with Cloudtail means competing with giants—Amazon and NR Narayana Murthy. We can’t do that.” Cloudtail, part of Prione Business Services, is a joint venture between Amazon Asia and Infosys founder Murthy’s investment venture Catamaran.The fourth hurdle is that sellers grumble there’s really no data that the top marketplaces share with them on what product is selling, demographics of buyers and related information that can help them push fast-moving items.Their source of market intelligence will reduce. Yash Dave, who runs his own ecommerce business and is a former vice-president at the eSeller Suraksha Forum, says, “My footfall (or clicks) could reduce as more sellers crowd the fewer platforms available.” Dave is among the young entrepreneurs who shifted focus to online commerce, anticipating a boom. “Yes, it’s a big, growing opportunity but not a bed of roses,” says the 27-year-old engineer-MBA who worked with JustDial before starting his business two years ago, roughly 40 km off Ahmedabad.Dave anticipates costs increasing as marketplaces such as Amazon have a no-questions-asked returns policy. Citing a case of a smartphone battery that was returned after one year by the buyer, another seller says, “The customer bought a new smartphone battery, kept it for a year and returned it, saying it was not working. The fact is that he had bought it a year back and exchanged it with a new one without paying! This might be a stray case but it happens. Returns can be done in two months and it’s not easy for sellers as they neither have control on the returns nor any say.”Sellers also say they can’t engage directly with online customers to resolve issues, something which eBay allowed. Amazon allows email communication. Even as returns policies hit their business, sellers see another dent coming from mid-May when Amazon is increasing seller fees from 10% to 15% and logistics will increase from Rs 30 to Rs 45 for 0.5 kg.Industry experts feel fears may be overplayed. Besides, they point out, Paytm and ShopClues continue to be pure marketplace alternatives.Niren Shah, managing director, Norwest Venture Partners India, says, “Consolidation was bound to happen as there were too many horizontal ecommerce players. Besides, marketplace success depends on where customers are, and buyers have clearly gravitated towards Amazon and Flipkart — sellers will have no choice but to go where the buyers are.”Choices also exist in the verticals. For instance, a furniture seller can look to Pepperfry or Urban Ladder. And there’s scope for more online players. The online ecommerce market itself is just $12 billion out of a $500-billion retail pie. “There’s plenty of headroom to grow,” says Sreedhar Prasad, partner, ecommerce and startups, KPMG India. What’s more, regulatory guidelines (of April 2016) direct marketplaces with foreign investments to cap sales originating from a single seller to 25%. This could actually drive players to diversify their seller base, notes an AT Kearney-Google report on ecommerce.So sellers’ fears that significant business is taken by Cloudtail or WS Retail may not be all that true.Sellers, for their part, counter that platforms circumvent the regulation by having multiple channels of their own online. Prasad adds, “It’s a growing business. Flipkart has kept alive Jabong and Myntra as well so far.” eBay India will also continue to operate as a separate entity.Even as sellers watch and wait how investors in ecommerce — who have invested more than $5 billion in the business — drive consolidation, they are working on alternatives. “Snapdeal is a fire sale as its strategies failed. But I have to ensure my business doesn’t go down,” says a seller on condition of anonymity.Chopra of Softek Surya, who increased the online piece of his business to 80% of the total, sees a shift to 50:50 — at least in the short term.“There’s lot of uncertainty in the market. Soon, we will have GST too and we don’t know how that will play out. We have seen Askmebazaar go down and sellers burning their fingers. We have to be more careful now,” he says.Sanjay Thakur, president of the eSellers Suraksha Forum, runs CyberStar, an online seller of electronics on multiple sites. Of late, Thakur has stepped up business with late comer TataCliq.com and WYDR.com, a B2B marketplace.Kohli’s Basement Bazaar has taken retail shelf space in several Delhi-NCR outlets. This shift started about six months ago and now offline accounts for 20% of its sales. Says Kohli, “Xiaomi, which started as an online-only seller in India, has started offline sales as well. Vivo, Oppo don’t sell online. They must have done more research; we are just following them to derisk from uncertainty.”Most sellers don’t see platforms like ShopClues or Paytm as big alternatives—the former because of the recent trouble among founders and the latter because of a bigger focus on its payments business.Besides, they are not among the top 2. “Alibaba, an investor in Paytm, has been waiting for too long to enter India directly—it knows there’s no point being a No 3 in the online space,” says Kohli. In US, Europe, China, Japan, there are only one or two large, diversified marketplaces and then there are verticals. “In India consolidation moves are pointing to a similar trajectory for ecommerce. But consolidation shifts power to few and that’s leading to uncertainty among sellers,” says Jaipurbased Aaviriti Jain, an online seller of jewellery.There are about 10 million regular online shoppers (of the total 50 million shoppers) in the $12-billion ecommerce market. But this pales in front of offline retail, worth all of $500 billion.The good news is that the yawning gap gives plenty of headroom for growth. A report on Digital Retail 2020 by consultancy AT Kearney and Google says by 2020 India will have 175 million online shoppers. And, given the current consolidation, the market could mature into a two-horse race by then.Sandeep Ladda, ecommerce lead at consultancy PwC, says, “Shoppers won’t have to go to too many sites to get what they are looking for— there’ll be more choice under one roof.”Sriwatsan Krishnan, Principal, Bain & Company India adds, “Consolidation points to decreasing possibility of some players fighting for customers/survival through deep-discounting (we saw such a spree in September-October last year).” On the flip side this will enable the larger e-commerce players to focus on sustainable economics through customer experience. “So the customer experience should see a gradual uptick as the consolidated market place focuses on serving, delighting and retaining customers,” adds Krishnan.