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As the customers move away from desktop to on-the-go mobile model, companies are providing every amenity to be in close touch with their customers maintaining the relationship.
Riding on the mcommerce, this time, Paytm has launched a dedicated app for sellers to connect small businesses and consumers.
Paytm’s seller app will work on zero commission model and expects the number of merchants on its network to triple to a lakh by end of this year. Presently, Paytm has about 30,000 merchants now which will further grow to 10 lakh by the end of next calendar.
How will the model work?
Merchants will be allowed to stock their own inventory, do their own deliveries but will be signed up with partner logistic companies to get better deals. The model also assures that till the merchant’s own commitment on return or exchange is valid, the payment made by a customer will stay in an escrow account.
“Everyone is moving to mobile now, but that is what we started with,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and chief executive of Paytm. “We see opportunity in enabling payments in everyday use cases.”
Paytm claims that it earns a revenue of over $500 Mn from its marketplace activities. This is expected to jump to $2 Bn along with half of Paytm’s run rate coming from mcommerce marketplace.
Erik Jing of Alipay, the Alibaba Group company which now owns 25% of Paytm, said, “Alipay is keen on expanding financial inclusion in India through Paytm. We don’t care about profitability. We care about SMEs, users on the Paytm wallet.”
Paytm, which is yet to turn profitable, is spending more than INR 500 Cr. on marketing this year. The company expects to grow the number of SKU’s from 8.5 Mn today to 100 million by the end of the year.
With this, the company has also announced the launch of Wallet app for transferring money to friends and family in an instant.
The company said that it has over 60 Mn wallets on its platform, currently and aims to reach over 100 Mn by the year end.
Just recently, Paytm launched a new app called Paytm Zip to connect users to both local offline as well as online grocers competing the online grocery players.
With this move Paytm has come in close competition to Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon. Just recently, Amazon has launched AmazonBusiness, a members only B2B website for small businesses, Snapdeal started aiding funds for small businesses.
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