E-commerce in India is opposing the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

This has brought together Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. Portals are becoming increasingly anxious about its implementation. They say if GST is implemented in its original form, the e-commerce industry in India will come to a standstill. They say tax evasion can be avoided by sharing of information, which they are already doing with states.

The bone of contention here is tax collection at source (TCS), which GST has made mandatory for all e-commerce portals. The aim has been to introduce a uniform tax regime for all e-commerce portals.

However, the issue is that TCS has to be collected by e-commerce portals themselves, and this is causing sleepless nights for them. There are lakhs of vendors and sellers on each of these platforms, and their count is increasing every single day. E-commerce portals will be required to spend huge amounts of money, time and resources to monitor the TCS for each of their sellers.

They claim this additional burden will reduce their profits and will slow them down and worsen things for them.

GST laws are being finalised, and most probably an announcement will be made by this month end.