Archive for April, 2021

PayTM Prepares to Compete With Amazon and Flipkart, Rolls Out New Features

April 10th, 2021

Paytm is gearing up to make its mark in the Indian e-commerce business through its online shopping store Paytm Mall. The online retail arm of the e-commerce company is backed by the China-based Alibaba Group and the Japanese SoftBank Group, which funded a cumulative amount of $450 million to its business recently. Since its launch in February last year, Paytm Mall is trying to reach its consumer base through products and services and claims to occupy 14% of the market share. However, the e-commerce field in the country is still dominated by the two bigger players Flipkart and Amazon offers. Therefore, to sustain in the competition Paytm has planned to introduce new features to attract more customers.

Features like No-Cost EMI, Extended Warranty, Device Insurance and Easy Exchange of products will be now made available to the buyers through all the partner stores of the company, both online and offline. The company is going to offer No-Cost EMI payment option for more than 2 million items listed on the Paytm Mall site, the total worth of which may be a whopping ₹1000 crores. The Easy Exchange option has been announced for over 6500 zip codes across the country and customers can also avail Device Warranties and Extended Warranties by paying an amount starting from ₹199.

Apart from that, the company entered into a partnership with Asus India, earlier this month, to become their primary sales channel in India. Paytm also allotted around $30 million for installing Point of Sales (POS) for all the Asus outlets across the country, through which sellers will be able to sell Asus products on both the online platform and the offline stores. The POS facility will help retailers to handle inventory using Cloud Technology, and keep tabs on all the data including stock, orders, payments and offers. This latest contract followed the company’s another tie-up with the fashion brand Red Tape, on this year’s February. As per the deal, all the offline outlets for Red Tape products will be having Paytm Mall QR codes. This will help customers to check out Red Tape products via the Mall app and place the order to get the items delivered in a minimum time by Paytm’s courier partners. Customers can physically collect their selected products from the outlets as well.

With these new partnership deals Paytm will enable its retail partners to provide all the intended facilities to their customers more efficiently. The company targets to collect at least a quarter of its total income from its offline and online partners by implementing these strategies.

Paytm is especially targeting to upgrade the Electronics Category for their e-commerce site, as this is the deciding category to succeed in the online retail industry. With the new features rolled out, they expect to make significant progress in the Electronics and Smartphones categories, for which Amazon and Flipkart are already battling to gain more market share.

Chief Operating Officer of Paytm, Amit Sinha, mentioned during the press release that, Paytm aims to re-create the trust and dependability of a neighbourhood store through its online platform for its customers and plans to introduce more affordable shopping options very soon. He also added, “I am confident these services have the potential to disrupt the offline retail economy by democratising access to technology and helping trusted retailers offer more value at the same price.”