Flipkart’s Samarth to empower artisans, weavers, craftsmen.

Indian e-commerce firm Flipkart recently launched ‘Flipkart Samarth’, an initiative aimed at attracting artisans, weavers, and handicrafts producers to e-commerce. The move will offer these under-served communities access to a constantly growing pan-India customer base of more than 150 million, while empowering them to leverage e-commerce benefits, it said. The initiative has been designed to support the e-commerce journey for artisans from on-boarding to the point they get familiar with the process of selling online. Benefits include dedicated support for on-boarding, cataloguing, account management, business insights, dedicated seller support, reduced commission where eligible and warehousing support, according to a Flipkart release.

The initiative will work closely with reputed non-governmental organisations (NGOs), government organisations and livelihood missions to reach a large number of rural entrepreneurs, with a special focus on women-led enterprises, differently-abled entrepreneurs, artisans and weavers, who often face obstacles such as lack of access to working capital, poor infrastructure, and inadequate training. Flipkart claims it has systematically assessed the pain points and aspirations of these groups and designed the initiative to address their problems and make it easier for them to list and sell online.