Flipkart, the e-commerce giant has been trying its hands over understanding the new tax reform and has started practicing way ahead of the actual GST roll out. The company has started following the GST guidelines and seems quite keen towards doing business with ease under the new tax reform. As this is a positive step taken by the e-commerce company, this will also give some helpful hint to other similar players in the market to start the practice in-order to prepare for the GST regime.
A Flipkart spokesperson said in this regard, “Our priorities over next few months are to make changes to our ERP systems, GST training across the seller ecosystems and internally within the organization and to engage with the government proactively during deliberations in the law-making process.”
Whereas other players were quite over their move on the same campaign, ShopClues founder Sandeep Aggarwal said that “e-commerce companies would have to set up new teams and processes and bring in technology to deduct taxes for thousands of sellers and file them with the government. Under GST, e-commerce platforms will have to adhere to tax collection at source (TCS) and collect and pay taxes on behalf of the sellers on their platforms.”
Dinesh Mishra, partner-advisory services at EY India,”TCS imposes a massive compliance burden on online marketplaces, with three different forms of GST filing (state, central and integrated) and three separate returns each month to be filed apart from the annual return, As of today, GST is expected to roll out on April 1 next year, and only those that have started their assessments are likely to be compliance-ready in time.”
“As of today, GST is expected to roll out on April 1next year, and only those that have started their assessments are likely to be compliance-ready in time. Companies can focus on optimizing the number of warehouses depending on their business instead of setting up a warehouse only to optimize taxes.” Mishra said.
IAMAI has taken into consideration, that the e-commerce players are the agents of sellers thereby interpreted as a place of business. For this, they have to complete the registration properly, and also improve their
logistics and supply chain management for the same.
Flipkart stated, “GST will enable us to optimize warehousing costs and also, to reach customers faster.” The company did not reveal if it will bring any change in the number of its warehouses.
