Just a few months after Paytm launched its e-commerce entity Paytm Mall, the latter is now looking to hire more employees to be able to reach more people across the country. Paytm Mall is an effort to build an offline-to-online (O2O) commerce marketplace in the country by tying up with trusted stores and selling their inventory on its platform.
The company currently has 350 agents who are reaching out to shopkeepers. It now intends to add at least another 3,000 people to its workforce to form a network of agents who’ll be able to access shopkeepers in both tier II and tier III cities and put their catalogs online. This will enable consumers to find these shopkeepers’ products online.
According to Amit Sinha, the COO of Paytm Mall,
Our team will onboard trusted merchants and will offer end-to-end support. This will help bring a much larger base of merchants who have been traditionally selling offline to become a part of mainstream digital ecommerce
While there are no details regarding the number of stores that will be onboarded using the new agent network, it is expected that the top fifty cities in the country will be covered.
Once this network is established, the local stores will be able to effectively expand their channels of revenue without the stress and worry of also managing additional inventory, payments, and logistics.
The process to be followed will be fairly simple. First, the agents of the network will give each shopkeeper a Paytm Mall QR code solution which will enable customers to scan the code using their smartphone. This will then allow them to see the store’s inventory online. After browsing these products, they will be able to place their orders.
To effectively use this, Paytm Mall will need to engage in physical distribution, merchant education and on-ground onboarding to convince shopkeepers and merchants to start using the platform.
The upcoming months may see the Paytm venture start door-to-door delivery from local stores, an attraction that is bound to draw in more customers.
