Looking to capture a bigger pie of Indian ecommerce that extends beyond retail, Snapdeal is reportedly in talks with commutech giant Uber. If the partnership goes through, Snapdeal customers will be able to book an Uber ride through the Snapdeal app.
Paytm can’t seem to get into enough verticals. After the e-commerce company started selling everything from bus tickets to movie tickets, it seems to be on the verge of expanding into a territory that’s completely foreign to Indian e-commerce providers – flight tickets.
After selling hotel rooms, buses, and even gold loans on its platform, Paytm is now going to be offering movie tickets for sale. The company has tied up with PVR, INOX and multiple other cinema houses to sell movie tickets.
Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has been known to speak his mind. “In this country, there’s no f*cking better brand than us!”, he’d roared at a Paytm party recently, before claiming that his company had achieved numbers in 2 years that others took 5 years to reach. It had seemed a dig at Flipkart and Snapdeal then, but now it turns out that he really doesn’t think very highly of these companies.
It’s the flavour of the season. Companies are rushing a grab a foothold in small town India, and are adapting their English interfaces to suit the average Indian consumer. After Snapdeal and Quikr had gone desi and made their apps available in local languages, e-commerce platform has now added a Hindi interface to its seller app to increase its appeal in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
Paytm is pulling out all stops to get ordinary Indians to transact digitally. After it was revealed that it had spent Rs. 588 crore in customer cashbacks last year, it has now scrapped transaction fees for offline merchants for its wallet transactions. This fees was applied to all transactions and ranged between 0.5% to 2.5% of the transaction value.
Paytm, the largest mobile payments platform is now in full steam to build and boost the payment bank operations.
The company is planning to recruit 3000 employees across departments. Also, a hunt for a CEO to lead the payments bank arm is on.
The package delivery was wholly unremarkable, much like the thousands that take place everyday across India. Except that it wasn’t the typical e-commerce delivery. For one, I’d mailed the package to myself. And secondly, I’d just scammed Quikr and Paytm of 2,000 rupees.
Madhya Pradesh isn’t a name that immediately springs to mind when you think of locations for tech startups. India’s tech scene usually has engineering offices in the startup hubs of Bangalore or Delhi, and prefers keeping its backend offices in close vicinity. But Paytm, India’s payments and e-commerce giant, is venturing into uncharted territory by setting up a center in Jabalpur.