India’s top ecommerce startups battle each other in courts over data theft

Photo credit: kotaku.com

Two of India’s largest ecommerce unicorns – Paytm and Snapdeal – are duelling in the Indian courts. This is over a lawsuit on data infringement filed by Paytm against Unicommerce, a tech startup which Snapdeal acquired in 2015.

Ecommerce marketplace and wallet provider Paytm has alleged that Unicommerce was accessing proprietary data of Paytm through seller panels, despite a warning.

Delhi-based Unicommerce provides tech support for sellers who sell on multiple platforms, including Paytm, Shopclues, Flipkart, and others. Therefore, Unicommerce, now a Snapdeal company, has access to information on the sales by sellers on rival Paytm, the petition in court said. Paytm had alleged that Unicommerce (read: Snapdeal) was also accessing sales analysis and user behavior on rivals through its seller panels.

Hearing the plea, a judge at the Delhi High Court stated in his order that Unicommerce has been instructed not to access the information on the sellers who are registered with the plaintiff (Paytm) and the defendant (Unicommerce) shall not use the said data for itself.

“Unicommerce has been instructed not to access the customers’ data and the sellers data which was being used to sign up sellers for our competition,” Paytm said in a scathing statement.

The court also instructed Unicommerce not to crawl on Paytm’s site. “This particular ruling in the order is extremely critical since now they will not be able to crawl any information from our panels and site,” a Paytm spokesperson said in a statement.

The court also instructed Unicommerce to pull down the YouTube videos where they are using the Paytm logo, and has given the company a week to comply.

Tech In Asia reached out to Unicommerce for this article. This is what the company said: “Paytm tried to claim monopoly over even the information that belongs to the sellers,” a Unicommerce spokesperson said.

“The information that belongs to the sellers like the sales made by the seller, the balance inventory of the seller is a data that belongs to the seller and that Paytm cannot exercise monopoly over the same,” Unicommerce spokesperson said.

The Snapdeal’s subsidiary iterated that that it will continue to operate in this manner.

Clearly, the war of words is not likely to end between the two rival Unicorns.

Stealing data from rival Indian startups

It’s common knowledge in India that data of sellers on each of the marketplaces is up for sale.