In a bold move, the country's largest mobile wallet Paytm will hive off its bread-and-butter payments business as a separate app, with the current app focusing on shopping. This will put the Alibaba-backed Paytm in direct confrontation with the deep-pocketed dedicated e-commerce players including Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal.
Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said the payments market (Paytm has more than 100 million registered customers) has reached the long-tail of Indian consumers, where the app requirements are different from that which urban English speaking customers needed.
The main app, which will morph into an e-commerce app, will continue to offer the wallet option for some time, but will prompt users to download the independent app for wallet use cases. The company is running pilots now and will launch the second app in January.
Facebook did a similar thing with its Messenger app, and while there was resistance, the move was successful with most users downloading Messenger. But can Paytm do it successfully? The risk is higher because unlike Facebook Messenger, which is only a small part of FB, the wallets business of Paytm is huge.
Sharma is confident. "Paytm is the default payments app for many and its use case needs to be simplified even as we as a company expand our horizon by adding commerce. By this method, we can make both users happy," he said.
Paytm's increasing commerce business that includes goods, bus tickets, hotel bookings and more, have made the app heavy and the co-existence with payments has complicated the payments use case, Sharma added. He felt that many rural customers will be put off by a heavier app and it makes sense to give them a simple light app for payments.
Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said the payments market (Paytm has more than 100 million registered customers) has reached the long-tail of Indian consumers, where the app requirements are different from that which urban English speaking customers needed.
The main app, which will morph into an e-commerce app, will continue to offer the wallet option for some time, but will prompt users to download the independent app for wallet use cases. The company is running pilots now and will launch the second app in January.
Facebook did a similar thing with its Messenger app, and while there was resistance, the move was successful with most users downloading Messenger. But can Paytm do it successfully? The risk is higher because unlike Facebook Messenger, which is only a small part of FB, the wallets business of Paytm is huge.
Sharma is confident. "Paytm is the default payments app for many and its use case needs to be simplified even as we as a company expand our horizon by adding commerce. By this method, we can make both users happy," he said.
Paytm's increasing commerce business that includes goods, bus tickets, hotel bookings and more, have made the app heavy and the co-existence with payments has complicated the payments use case, Sharma added. He felt that many rural customers will be put off by a heavier app and it makes sense to give them a simple light app for payments.
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