GeM becomes India’s first e-commerce portal to cross 10 lakh seller milestone

 The Government eMarketplace (GeM), the business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce marketplace for government organisations and departments to procure goods from MSMEs in the country, has crossed the whopping 10-lakh-seller milestone within four-and-a-half years of its launch.

The GeM, as of January 27, 2020, listed 10,13,448 sellers and service providers across over 13,000 product and 178 service categories, according to a data sourced from the marketplace.

Launched on August 9, 2016, to enhance speed and transparency in the public procurement process for MSMEs, the marketplace has processed 55.74 lakh orders with the transaction value crossing the Rs 80,000-crore mark. With the staggering seller base, GeM is arguably the largest e-commerce marketplace in the country.

Out of total sellers, the number of micro and small sellers has also increased from more than 66,000 in January 2020 to over 4.71 lakh in January 2021. This has led to a jump in their share from 22 per cent to 46. 5 per cent of the total seller count during the said period. The value of orders processed by these micro and small sellers was 57.90 per cent at the time of filing this report.

GeM CEO Talleen Kumar didn’t immediately respond to the request for comments.

It has been reported that in December the GeM added 40,212 new sellers on an average per month along with 486 new product categories every month in 2020. Taking a cue from the growth of the GeM portal, the government along with SBI has been working on launching the B2C e-commerce marketplace Bharat Craft for MSMEs to market and sell their products in India and internationally similar to platforms such as Amazon and Alibaba.