By Devangi Narang
The e-commerce industry in India has experienced tremendous growth in the past decade. According to Morgan Stanley, Indias e-commerce market stood at $16 billion as of December 2016 and has the potential of growing seven times higher. To join the race, Paytm, after seeing an incomparable success of its mobile wallet, expanded its reach in the e-commerce segment earlier this year and launched Paytm Mall.
Paytm Mall: A unique shopping experience
Paytm Mall, which marks the formal entry of Chinese e-commerce major Alibaba in the country, is a new avatar of Paytms three-year-old e-commerce business. Alibaba Singapore E-Commerce Private Limited will invest Rs 1,180 crore ($177 million) in Paytm Mall. Investment firm SAIF Partners participated in a $200 million (Rs 1,350 crore) round in Paytm in March this year.
According to a Paytm statement, Paytm Mall will allow customers to shop 68 million products across categories such as fashion, electronics, consumer durables and home furnishings, from about 140,000 sellers.
Paytm said it will manage its deliveries through seventeen fulfilment centres of third-party warehouse providers and those owned by sellers. It will leverage the network of its 40 courier partners. The company claims that these centres would offer consumers the most trusted and efficient online shopping experience. Paytm Mall will offer a unique combination of the Mall and Bazaar concepts to Indian consumers, the statement said.
Weeding out dubious sellers
According to latest developments, Paytm Mall has delisted 85,000 sellers, leaving just 30,000 on its platform. Paytm delisted those who did not conform to the quality standards set by the platform. The move comes as a part of the companys strategy to enhance customer experience on its platform and to get an edge over rivals like Flipkart and Amazon.
In an effort to clean up its systems by enforcing a higher degree of compliance, Paytm wants to weed out dubious seller profiles and fraudulent practices. According to the company, the move aims to gain customer confidence in the e-commerce market. Even though this announcement came out a fortnight after the GST rollout, Paytm maintains that the move to delist sellers is independent of the implementation of GST.
Setting a new benchmark for quality
As part of the companys new seller onboarding policy, Paytm Mall will also mandate the submission of brand authentication letters before sellers can put their goods on the e-commerce platform. Sellers will undergo strict quality and service audits that will include their registration number, shop location, shop photos and GSTIN.
Paytm Mall will continue to partner with reputed shopkeepers and brands, bringing their catalogues online, enabling smoother discovery and buying experience for their products. Our goal is to set the benchmark for a platform that empowers reputed local shopkeepers and brands to sell quality merchandise. We will work closely with existing sellers and continue onboarding further, said Amit Sinha, chief operating officer, Paytm Mall.
Efforts to keep sellers happy
To make its sellers happy too, Paytm will allow brands and shopkeepers to determine the return, exchange and refund policies for their products being sold on the platform. This move, however, may prove to be detrimental for the platform. It might result in customers facing a difficult shopping experience if there are different return, exchange and refund policies for the same category of goods.
Recently, Paytm Mall launched a comprehensive seller assistance programme to help merchants on its platforms to become GST-compliant. Paytm Mall also offered third-party experts on its seller services platform to facilitate tax-compliance ahead of the GST launch. It has conducted several offline camps and online workshops to educate sellers about the new tax regime.
Moreover, shops will be provided with Paytm Mall QR Codes. This will allow consumers to scan and browse the products and place an order instantly. It will also enable local shops to tap into additional revenue streams from customers who can buy their products online.
Ambitious expansion plans
Earlier this month, Paytm Mall announced its plans to add 3,000 more employees to handle marketing, business development and back-end tech. With this, it aims to dig deeper into tier-I and tier-II cities. It will also hire 2,000 more employees in business and technology segment by the end of this year.
The company has begun exploring the offline-to-online (O2O) commerce by cataloguing inventories of physical shops to enable the discovery of products online. Moreover, Paytm Mall is likely to invest about $200 million in the Bengaluru-based company- Big Basket for a significant minority stake, according to a Times of India report.
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