Mobile wallet brand Paytm, which has a sellers’ marketplace that competes with the likes of Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon and Shopclues, is unveiling its first festive season sale. “This is our first festive season, and we will give it our best shot,” said Saurabh Vashishtha, vice president, business. “All our products will have special prices — either discounts or cashback.”
The cashback will go to the buyers’ Paytm wallet, the proceeds of which can be used to further buy products or for services like mobile and DTH recharge or even be transferred to another Paytm wallet.
The sale will begin on Gandhi Jayanti and won’t be a short one — it will go on for a month and, after a break, will continue till December.
Paytm has been negotiating terms and pricing with sellers — 50,000 of them — for months to offer the best prices to beat competition. It has already listed 2 million unique products. Discounts will range from 20% to as high at 80%.
“Over six months, we have built a catalogue that competes with the best in class – be it top brands or unstructured good. But our focus has always been on unstructured goods,” says Vashishtha.
India’s largest mobile wallet company, which boasts of 85 million wallet users, expects transactions on its marketplace to go up three to four times. To get more marketshare and mindshare, it has also put in a feature called “bargain”, which as the name suggests allows buyers to bargain with the seller via chat.
“If another company is giving a lower price, we’ll match it,” adds Vashishtha. Paytm’s marketplace will be available for non-Paytm wallet holders for the first time.