Taking up its ecommerce domain a notch above, Paytm has today announced debut of its same day delivery service. The service — which by the way Flipkart and Amazon already offer — is being started with 20 cities and 2 product categories.
While Paytm has pioneered the digital payments space in India, and is infact going to do a lot more once its payments bank officially launched, ecommerce hasn’t panned out the way digital payments have. And all that, despite being backed by Jack Ma’s Alibaba. The company has been behind Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal ever since it ventured out into ecommerce, and has failed to leverage the huge amount of resources and outreach at its disposal.
There could be several reasons for the same. But keeping past aside, Paytm has lately been pro-actively playing the catching up game with numerous ecommerce focussed announcements. Most recent of them — giving Indian sellers the ability to source products from China, and also sell the same there.
The latest of these catching up measures is same day delivery — a genre already mastered by Amazon with Flipkart doing decently well too. However, what gives Paytm an edge over Flipkart is the scope of this service — Flipkart offers same day delivery in 10 cities, while Paytm is debuting it with 20.
Paytm is the pioneer of O2O and with same day delivery and installation managed by sellers being added to the arsenal we are able to cover a critical category of large appliances which cannot be shipped by traditional warehousing models.
says Sudhanshu Gupta, Vice President – Paytm
The company has begun with deliveries with locally based commerce and will further add more categories to it. Currently, the same day delivery is available on large appliances, mobiles and is already active on the platform. Over ₹20 crore worth of orders in a month are shipped the same day to the customers.
Why target large appliances to start with ? Well, Paytm has over 1.2 lakh sellers on their platform out of which over 3000 are sellers who specialize in shipping large appliances locally. The company is aiming to add 10,000 more sellers in 50 top cities to spread the reach of O2O commerce further.
Sellers themselves provide the delivery and installation service while Paytm enables them by training on how to manage online customer expectations and experience.
The process of booking under this category is pretty much similar to what others are offering. Paytm enables consumers to check whether products are available to from nearby sellers who can ship and service the orders. The consumers have to pay a nominal amount to avail the same day shipping and installation services.
