Paytm Mall’s efforts to boost up its offline to online (O2O) initiative has received a further fillip with the company offering a range of additional benefits to its customers. These benefits include EMIs without any interest, extended warranty, insurance for devices bought on its platform and better norms for exchange of products, particularly in the case of mobile phones and home appliances.
Paytm Mall has fixed some stiff targets for itself the current financial year ending March 2019 and has decided to focus on specific categories such as smartphones, consumer electronics and appliances or white goods. Paytm believes that many of these offerings from their end could be game changers since the offline sector does not offer any of this right now.
Funded largely by Japan’s SoftBank and China’s Alibaba, Paytm is now under tremendous pressure to compete with the runaway leaders Amazon and Flipkart, now acquired by Walmart.
The company is said to be seeking additional funding to the tune of $3 billion from SoftBank. To cover the EMI schemes alone Paytm may need around Rs 1,000 crore. The offer is expected to cover around 2 million products from 60 different brands.
It has been reported that Paytm E-Commerce, the company that owns Paytm Mall has entered into special arrangements with top manufacturers such as Samsung, Panasonic, Symphony and LG and others for this purpose. For the financing or the EMI options, Bajaj Finserv and ICICI are on board.
The idea is to bring around 75,000 offline retail stores under the ambit of this scheme and may cover around 7000 PIN codes across the country.
With the last valuation of Paytm being $1.9 billion, a lot is at stake for the company and innovative strategies and out of the box thinking can only make it successful in the highly competitive environment the Indian consumer market is turning out to be.