What's a Take Rate?
In the past few days, the battle between online aggregators and sellers have intensified. The bone of contention here is the high take rates. Take rate in e-commerce parlance is the commission fee charged by a marketplace for a transaction it facilitates on its platform. Indian rules allow foreign funded e-commerce companies only to run on a marketplace model. This means that they can't own the inventory but allow other sellers to sell on their platforms. Companies such as Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, Zomato, Ola and Uber charge commissions which can range from early single digits to 30 percent or above depending on the category of the item sold, deal size and branding of the seller, among other things.