Reselling Practices in a Textile Bazaar: Translating E-Commerce Platforms to WhatsApp

We examine WhatsApp-based reselling practices adopted by small garment sellers in Surat, a textile city in India, as a response to the challenges posed by high commission costs, confusing dashboards, and restrictive rules of global e-commerce platforms. Through interviews and observations, we show how sellers use WhatsApp’s popularity to collaborate with women resellers and customers, enabling participation in online commerce bypassing e-commerce platforms. Using the lens of translation, we argue that WhatsApp functions as a tool and site of praxis for sellers who translate the complicated, standardized, and expensive processes of e-commerce platforms that are in English into multimodal, idiomatic, collaborative reselling practices. These are undertaken in regional languages on WhatsApp with the help of traders and women resellers economically benefiting everyone while delivering a personalized online shopping experience for customers. We discuss the politics of this translation, examining its impact on the design of e-commerce platforms while also shaping the discourse of reselling as an empowering pathway for women.