Big brands drive seller sign-ups for Paytm Mall
E-commerce major offers Samsung and others a way to get around the online/offline tug of wills
In the next four months, Alibaba-backed Paytm Mall hopes to have all 150,000 of Samsung’s authorised retailers in India on its platform. The move, it says, will help the ecommerce entity become the single largest seller of mobile telephony devices in the country, a distinction now held by rival Flipkart.
Amit Sinha, chief operating officer of Paytm Mall, says brands have so far been unable to ignore e-commerce players but at the same time had to face the wrath of their offline channels as online ones engaged in deep discounting. With Paytm Mall, the offers you see online are the same ones you get offline, he assured.
“Brands like Samsung are very concerned about the discounting. They want to control the market operating price because at the end of the day, 80 per cent of (their) sales happen through the offline channel. Brands were getting hammered by their offline partners, who were asking them to boycott online players,” said Sinha.
Paytm Mall also partners with small offline retailers. It asks them to route purchases by customers through its platform; in return it will drive traffic from the web to their stores. The upside is that offline retailers will now be able to offer deals and discounts to compete with Flipkart and Amazon as Paytm Mall burns cash to catch its rivals.
The targets are ambitious. Paytm Mall wants the gross merchandise value (GMV) of products sold on its platform to cross $10 billion next year, a claimed three-time jump from the $3 bn in GMV during the past year. All of these will be driven through offline retailers and Paytm Mall is taking the help of brands to sign these up.
“Our pitch to Samsung was that each of their shopkeepers will be on a single platform and will be able to keep their inventory, sell through that system and we will have the same offers that are available on the online platform.
Today, Samsung invites us to all their dealer and retailer meets, to come and explain what we're doing,” added Sinha.
Paytm Mall has so far signed up 25,000 authorised retailers for Samsung devices; the number is going up. Apart from Samsung being able to keep its offline retail community happy, it gives the company the ability to monitor unsold inventory like never before and micro-manage offers across its entire channel, rather than in a few stores.
With Paytm Mall directing traffic to stores and being able to fulfill orders made at one store with the inventory stored at another, brands like Samsung can augment their earnings.
Chinese firm Lenovo is also working closely with it, a partnership which helped the latter to become the largest seller of laptops in India says Sinha.
He is, for now, focusing on major e-commerce categories such as phones, electronics, personal computers, appliances and fashion, while not revealing many names.