The new e-marketplace for tea to be set up at Jorhat in Assam by India’s largest B2B e-commerce company, mjunction services limited, will use an innovative e-platform to be devised in consultation with the Tea Board, and is expected to score heavily in terms of turnaround time and cost effectiveness.
mjunction has been appointed as the system integrator to design, develop, implement and maintain this e-auction platform. The e-auction system will aid fair and market-driven price discovery. Though Assam provides the highest quantity of the tea in India, it has only one auction centre and thus the whole process of ‘production to payment’ takes more than a month. mjunction plans to shorten this cycle time with features like automated catalogue management.
As per Tea Board officials, “We are introducing the new platform through mjunction to push the price discovery part. The new system will be in place in three months. It would be handling up to 200 million kg of tea per year.”
According to mjunction MD & CEO Mr Vinaya Varma, “We have been associated with the tea industry for some time, and our upcoming tea e-marketplace in Jorhat will help us to make a difference to a large cross-section of buyers and sellers in the industry, giving them access to a wide range of services from a single platform.”
The inclusive e-marketplace model is expected to bring on board secondary and tertiary buyers from all over the country, giving them access to the freshest tea, easy to use automated catalogue and faster movement of material.
For the sellers, apart from shorter turnaround time and fair price discovery, this model would provide cost savings through focused sampling, and would ensure proper data analysis for setting the reserve price of tea.
