Indian e-commerce platform Paytm has acquired one-year old startup Near.in for about $ 2 million, reports TOI. Two of the three Near.in founders Lomesh Dutta and Sunil Goyal will join Paytm as vice-presidents.
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.
This Investment came rite before the festive season kicks in. Alibaba is also investor in Snapdeal. With this investment Alibaba directly would have 20% stake and Ant’s shareholding will come down to 20% from 25% before
With the launch of Freecharge wallet on Tuesday, Snapdeal is taking on market leader Paytm head on that recently claimed to have more than 100 million wallet users in the country.And whichever side we may look but in the end consumers will be the winners.
Things are afoot in the payments industry. Its all started in August when RBI approved payment banks licenses for Airtel, Reliance, Paytm, Vodafone and Aditya Birla Nuvo. Several other entities which have been given ‘in-principle’ approval. Mobikwik, Oxigen, Citrus, and Novopay Itz Cash Card also applied for the licence but failed to get the nod from RBI.
Paytm had come across a problem that’s familiar to all e-commerce companies in India – customers being rude and abusive towards their support staff. But unlike other companies that believe in the customer always being right, Paytm decided to take a stand. The company has decided to block customers from their platform who are unreasonably belligerent.
The ecommerce marketing wars in India are heating up. After Amazon and Flipkart had sparred over Flipkart’s #AcchaKiya campaign, and Flipkart and Snapdeal CEOs had a war of words on twitter, Paytm has entered the fray, and how. In a mega 203 crore deal, Paytm has bagged sponsorship rights to all BCCI matches till 2019.