Vijay Shekhar Sharma And Deepinder Goyal Are Having A War Of Words On Twitter Over Paytm Messaging Zomato Users

Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal are currently engaged in a war of words on Twitter.

The issue at hand is a user who ordered food on Zomato and paid via netbanking. Soon after placing his order, he got an SMS from Paytm referencing his exact order, and asking him to pay via the Paytm app.

The user was understandably taken aback – he’d not dealt with Paytm during his entire transaction, yet he got a message from them about his order amount and the restaurant he’d ordered from. When brought up the issue on Twitter, Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma himself replied with an explanation.

Sharma seemed to imply is that Paytm purchased the “order confirmation inventory” from a third party order management system that the restaurant used. As such, Paytm immediately knew that the user had placed an order, and was able to target him with a relevant message.

The user, though, wasn’t happy with the explanation.

At this point, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal joined in, and implied that Paytm shouldn’t be buying third party data to target users. He went on to say that Paytm’s tactics meant poor user experience for Zomato users, and Paytm shouldn’t “stoop” to the level of other companies which were engaged in similar practices. 

 

Vijay Shekhar Sharma sought to smooth things over with a “Theek hai, Lay low bhaiya.” 

Deepinder Goyal, though was in no mood to relent, and clarified that Zomato had nothing to do with the message being sent.

While the Paytm CEO has said he’s going offline because it’s late in the timezone he’s in, the whole incident does raise a lot of questions. Deepinder Goyal thinks that Zomato isn’t at fault in the whole issue, but the order was placed on Zomato, and if the restaurant uses third-party merchants, shouldn’t it try to ensure that their data isn’t shared? And should Paytm be using data on other sites to send immediate, hyper-targeted messages to users? While the immediate conversation around this seem to have stopped, one senses the issue isn’t quite resolved.