Digital payments major Paytm has just unveiled its first rewards and loyalty programme ‘Paytm First’ that the company hopes will see more customers retained on its platform. As per an Economic times report, the program entails a one-time subscription of Rs 750 by the customer opting for it.
On the rewards side, an attractive line-up of annual memberships for Zomato Gold, Gaana, Sony LIV, Viu Premium, Eros Now and Uber are thrown in for free. That must be quite an attraction, since these will add up to quite a sum if individually paid for. And they also span a range of genres, food, travel, shopping, video and music streaming and lifestyle. From the perspective of these companies partnering with Paytm, they may end up getting more customers for their business without their having to shed blood and sweat in the marketplace.
Competition in the digital wallet space has been growing exponentiallty. The choices in front of the customer today are quite diverse. PhonePe, Amazon Pay, Google Pay and WhatsApp Pay have all entered the market, each of them having solid backers with no dearth of funds to splurge.
ET reports that this could possibly be Paytm’s attempt to fashion itself as India’s Tencent, an app of apps.
Paytm claims the Rs 750 that the customer pays will get him/her as much as Rs 12,000 in terms of rewards and benefits. In addition to rewards such as cashbacks, Paytm First customers will get certain privileges on the ecommerce platform owned by the company, Paytm Mall in the form of and priority shipping and customer service.
Paytm says it has a target of signing up 3 million subscribers to Paytm First in the first year of launch itself.
Paytm has a galaxy of investors in its business, with SoftBank, Alibaba and its arm Ant Financial and Berkshire Hathaway of Warren Buffett.