Amazon.com will take its leave of an Indian e-tail enablement joint venture named Cloudtail, which will close in 2022 – seemingly because it may have been a little too successful.

The JV is seven years old and saw Amazon team with a local outfit named Catamaran to help Indian merchants start selling online.

The plan worked. A statement from the companies seen by The Register says the companies "enabled over 300,000 sellers and entrepreneurs to go online and enabled four million merchants with digital payment capabilities".

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Access to e-commerce is hard to argue against, but Catamaran's efforts made Cloudtail a dominant seller on Amazon.com's Indian site. That left Amazon in an awkward position, because India's government is keenly aware that big e-commerce platforms have the power to use discounts and flash sales to privilege vendors in which they hold a stake, and recently moved to [2]stop such practices because they make it hard for independent vendors to compete.

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Amazon wasn't the only target of the new rules. When India's government [5]annoucned its new e-commerce regulations it mentioned "widespread cheating and unfair trade practices being observed in e-commerce ecosystem[s]".

[6]India changes tack and tenders for public-private partnerships to complete national broadband rollout

[7]Booming balance sheets for India's big four outsourcers after horrible quarter at home

[8]Walmart’s Indian outpost FlipKart picks industrial giant’s India-US joint venture for Chennai data center

The political climate for foreign e-tailers was this week further complicated by Indian courts, which green-lit an antitrust investigation into Amazon.com and Flipkart – an e-commerce outlet controlled by US retail giant Walmart.

India has even decided to [9]create a national e-commerce platform that it hopes will compete with foreign players.

The statement from Amazon and Catamaran/Cloudtail has a "mission accomplished" vibe – neither mentions regulatory worries, preferring instead to suggest that the joint venture has signed so many merchants that it has "played an important role in transforming Indian e-commerce, and paving the way for the global scale up of emerging Indian brands".

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Whatever Cloudtail's past successes, its future is grim – the company will close in May next year. ®

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[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/22/india_ecommerce_consumer_protection_rules/

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[5] https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1729201

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/23/bharatnet_ppp_tender/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/hcl_infosys_tcs_wipro_q1_22/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/16/walmarts_indian_flipkart/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/08/open_network_for_digital_commerce_india/

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[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/