Meesho’s No Tolerance Approach to Platform Misuse

Meesho’s platform is built for small businesses. We enable individuals across the country to start their online business without any investment. Our entrepreneurs sell products to consumers outside our platform, mostly on WhatsApp, Facebook and other channels.

Meesho has enabled 15 Million people across the country to fulfill their dreams of running an online business, 80%+ of them are women from small towns and cities. We have also enabled ~200K small manufacturers, distributors and traders to get access to pan India demand and keep food on the table during the pandemic, when offline retail was badly affected.

At Meesho, we have always worked to provide a clean platform experience to our sellers, entrepreneurs and end customers — which is in line with our vision to enable and empower 100 million small businesses to succeed online in India. However, recently, we have had complaints of unconsented orders reaching our customers. We have seen a few miscreants place fraudulent orders with high margins to cheat our customers into paying for a product they didn’t order. In such cases, we suspect the user data being extracted from an alternate source, outside of the Meesho platform which has been the cause of these unconsented orders.

The emergence of such unconsented orders has definitely caused grave inconvenience to our customers. In addition to this, logistics costs of these unconsented, failed orders are borne by Meesho and our sellers — a big financial burden to our entire ecosystem. We take this very seriously.

Millions of users on the platform across India have trusted our network of entrepreneurs, suppliers and vendors in this digital commerce process. We are a consumer and people-first organisation and stay very committed towards resolving any issue that our customers are facing. We are actively investigating the issue on hand, using technology to identify and block such fraudulent resellers that get through the system. Furthermore, we have deployed several processes to counteract such activities with preventive measures, which are as follows:

1. Data Science Model: Our in-house data science model detects orders that have a high probability of getting returned because of refusal by the end customer at the doorstep. This is an advanced supervised model that learns from existing orders, user behaviour, and product metrics to identify key patterns that are potential indicators of an unconsented order. The model runs in real-time to generate probability scores for each Meesho order and creates a risk profile of each identified order.
2. Action on High risk orders: Post identification of these orders, and based on the risk profile a lot of orders are automatically cancelled. For the rest, our Fulfillment team checks the genuineness of these orders. In this process, the end customer of a high risk order is contacted (through Interactive Voice Response) and asked to confirm if they have indeed placed the order with the reseller. Based on the customer response, we then cancel these orders. This process has enabled us to reduce the quantum of such high risk orders by greater than 50% of the total number of such orders (typically in the range of 0.01% of total orders).
3. Grievance Redressal Process: We follow a multi-step process to address consumer grievance on all platforms — from deploying immediate actions to arranging for the product to be picked up, and initiating refunds for unconsented orders.

In addition to the above, we have deployed multiple channels for customers to reach out to us in case of such unconsented orders. So far, we have addressed 100% of grievances raised, to support our customers. We also have a dedicated number, 080–68878782, for reporting any kind of fraudulent act that any customer is subject to and is available on our website. If you, dear customer, encounter any such cases of unconsented orders, we urge you to connect with us immediately. We will assure you a full refund, and will take strict action against these perpetrators. As a future measure, to address and solve any such grievances, we are going to make lifeline numbers available on our product labels very soon.

More importantly, we have also engaged Deloitte to conduct a forensic audit and investigate this issue; which will help us identify any process gaps as well as obtain actionable intelligence to undertake appropriate legal action against those who have used our platform to defraud others.

Meesho has always been a user-first company since its inception. Our customers are our biggest strength and addressing their concerns, solving their problems will always be a priority for us. And we are here to make sure that we make our Meesho family successful at every stage of their online entrepreneurship.