In a move to take on its biggest arch-rival Paytm, Freecharge yesterday announced its zero cost offer for merchants. Now, the company has released a statement stating the offer has created a tremendous buzz amongst merchants.
The company says that the offer led to a sharp increase in the number of merchants signing up to start receiving their payments through FreeCharge. However, the company has not yet revealed the exact numbers.
Commenting on this, Govind Rajan, CEO at FreeCharge, said,
After rolling out the Zero Cost offer, we have received thousands of queries and missed calls. Since today morning, our team has been signing up a merchant every 30 seconds. A dedicated team is in place to assist the merchants. We are committed to making the digital transition swift, seamless and easy for our merchant partners.
In its Zero Cost Offer, Freecharge has completely removed the initial set-up charges and also the commission charged from merchants on each transaction. To make the complete digital payments process completely free, it also waived the charge for transferring funds from the FreeCharge wallet to the merchant’s bank.
The company has also said that nearly 60% of the merchants who signed up over the last 2 days have received their first digital payment within just one hour of starting their FreeCharge wallet. It further reveals that the largest number of sign-ups are from self-employed professionals and food delivery joints.
Freecharge is India’s one of the fastest growing wallet service provider. In this market, its biggest competitor includes Paytm, which is also growing rapidly after the government’s demonetization announcement. Paytm has seen 1000% growth in mobile transactions and has also hit 5 million daily transaction mark.