A year ago, the food tech sector was booming. Funds were plentiful, investors were upbeat, and a new company seemed to be coming up every minute. Cut to a year later, and things aren’t quite so rosy. There have been murmurs of overvalued companies, and investors are being more circumspect with their cash. One sector that has been particularly hard hit is the food tech industry.
Paytm has announced that it will be splitting its original business wallet into a separate app. The current Paytm app will soon lose its wallet functionality and become a standalone shopping app, competing with the likes of Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. This move reinforces Paytm’s ambitions to become a large part of India’s ecommerce space.
Zomato’s deal with hyper-local delivery company Pickingo appears to be in trouble. Two months ago, the company had announced an investment in Gurgaon-based Pickingo, which would’ve seen Zomato own a 10% stake in Pickingo. But the plans appears to be on hold after recent developments, reported Economic Times.
In another bad news coming in from the food tech startup world, TinyOwl is set to lay off another 100 employees
Not too long ago, the world had its eyes on China as one of the fastest growing countries in the globe. Now its economy has been slowing down, and the future doesn’t look quite as bright any more. One of the bright spots in China’s economy was its e-commerce sector, where players like Alibaba were breaking new ground with their humungous sales figures. A new report, however, takes the sheen off these numbers.
The mega sales have ended. The partying is also over. E-commerce majors such as Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal are now in for some sobering news.
Government of India has asked Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) to probe whether e-commerce majors have violated Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) rules by engaging in business-to-consumers (B2C) activity.
With several online customers facing such bad experiences in terms of pricing discrepancies, non-availability of desired products, or even receiving sub-standard or fake products, online marketers are now pulling up their socks to ensure customer satisfaction on one hand, and prevent fraud on the other. And one of the approaches taken by many ecommerce platforms, including biggies Flipkart and Amazon is introduction of the Mystery Shopper.
All’s not well at Zomato. Weeks after the company had announced that it was laying off 10% of its workforce in an apparent restructuring, it has emerged that for the first time in 5 years, the company is falling short of its sales targets. And Deepinder Goyal, the 32 year CEO, is not pleased.
After the big success of its 5 day sale- The Big Billion Days- the company threw a big bash celebrating and also its 8th anniversary which happened to this month.