After legal battle between two largest cab-hailing startups in India – Uber and Ola, a similar situation is brewing — this time in the eCommerce segment, and surprisingly between two companies backed by a common investor — Alibaba.
According to a report of Economic Times, PayTM has filed a lawsuit against Unicommerce, an e-commerce management software provider, owned by Snapdeal.
Paytm has accused Unicommerce of accessing confidential business data on Paytm’s commerce platform through the sellers on this platform. It has also claimed that Unicommerce is using Paytm’s logo and name without any authorization.
Since many sellers on Paytm’s platform are using Unicommerce for managing orders and inventory across multiple marketplaces and carts, the data could be used by Snapdeal to create strategy against Paytm. The data could provide valuable information which can have negative effect on the company.
Unicommerce is an online multi channel order fulfillment platform which enables e-commerce merchants of all sizes to sell efficiently. It was founded by Ankit Pruthi, Vibhu Garg, Karun Singla and Manish Gupta in 2012.
It had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Nexus Venture Partners in 2013. In 2014, it raised $10 million from Tiger Global Management. Last year, it was acquired by Snapdeal.
Paytm and Snapdeal are the biggest rivals in one of the most competitive space – payment and eCommerce. Snapdeal entered the payment segment with the acquisition of Freecharge while Paytm started as a payment portal but later expanded to commerce segment as well and is currently the largest mobile commerce platform in India.
Earlier, Uber had accused Ola of disrupting its business by creating fake accounts and has also filed petition in the court seeking damages of Ola’s act. Uber claimed to have incurred loss of around Rs. 50 crore and sought “declaration, perpetual injunction and damages” against Ola in the petition.
