Paytm mall to shutdown or aggressively reduce business

Great news!

That’s good…Paytm was unnecessarily going in this segment…Paytm is great in all other segments.

So what new can be expected now?

in past few months paytmmall removed cashback’s and is only providing cashback in form of coupon codes.

So this was bound to happen

It will reduce competition in e commerce space. Other players may also reduce discount / cashback which is not good for consumers.

The stupid culture of offers should perish, it’s damaging the whole ecosystem in a very bad way. Let these e-commerce sites put in place an efficient system to cut down their operational costs and then compete with the brick and mortar stores but not by unfair practices. All they do is to raise funds, give deep discounts to an extent of selling products at all and label them grand as “Customer Acquisition”, sheer stupidity.

We Indians rarely show loyalty, especially when it comes to non recurring purchases like electronics, furniture etc., all we look at is a decently reliable portal giving the best price, be it Amazon or Flipkart or even SnapDeal or Paytm.

I personally would prefer any of these portals if they provide impeccable service, delivery, after sales support etc from their end. It’s time they spend more money on improving customer experience than to spend it on customer acquisition. Any company can acquire a customer initially by providing discounts but what matters more is to create stickiness to the platform and this happens only when the customer experience is great.

Good for Paytm, phaltu ki deals se waise bhi pareshan ho gaye the.

PayTM is doing good in service, they should explore banking, Share DPA …..

They should scale down a bit.. loll The business aggression is much more with this one.. though it’s a good thing that they have managed so much in business acquisition front, while miserably failed in after sales support since start. Sometimes I feel like there may be anything left where we can’t use paytm.

Flipkart is next in the line with it’s phonepe chaos while copycat-ing Amazon businesses.

@Chikky @DaBomb

May be I put out a few statements in a wrong sense. Flipkart and Amazon are the best of the lot so far but the kind of customer experience we get is still way different from what it is in countries where these platforms are penalised heavily for negligence or flouting the rules. Of course they are partly better than brick and mortar stores but not in every sense. I had multiple instances in the past when the brick and mortar store could arm twist the local Sony/Samsung service centre to attend my complain after repeatedly failing to do so directly but I have never seen Amazon or Flipkart taking any sort of responsibility until the product is dead on arrival, all they do is to ask us to approach the brand directly. In fact, for iPhones, they are not even handling dead on arrival issues lately and asks customers to go and talk to Apple service centres directly for a replacement!

Charging extra for using cards was never an issue in the past few years, at least at all major stores here in Hyderabad so won’t generalise beyond that as I am not aware of the ground reality in other locations.

About invading taxes, high margins and what not. This is where I want these e-commerce portals to compete. Yes, of course maintaining a large warehouse and showroom will have loads of overheads and that has to be paid by we as customers but that doesn’t directly result into very high margins. Yes, these stores used to have good margins for sure.

By the way, brand loyalty is different from platform loyalty. Most people would agree that they only reason they used to prefer paytm over Flipkart or Amazon was because the amazing offers they used to provide. The only point in contention was discount and not the service. Given an option of maintaining almost similar price we would have never opted for Paytm over Amazon or Flipkart and this is what I meant by showing loyalty. Would you not choose the much rumoured Reliance ecommerce portal if they start off with great offers during launch? I mean, we do not even know what sort of service they would offer but we will all give it a try at least for the competitive prices if they do so. I would definitely do it!

Let me break it down in more simple terms.
1. I always record videos of unboxing my packages that are expensive due to the fear of having a missing or wrong product and to have a proof with me whenever I purchase something on even the best of the portals here such as Flipkart and Amazon. Never done that for purchases made in US, in fact I get them delivered to a friend who gets it to India. Thats the kind of experience you get when these portals are made accountable, one small mistake and they are slapped with fines. I really wish to see such accountability in India as well.

2. More than 50% of the deliveries to my home happen only after a few calls from executives on how to reach our home even after the address and land mark are provided conveniently. How about investing some money in training their fleet of delivery executives on how to handle it better?

3. Rather than discounting a gadget deeply, how about providing an end to end service support throughout the warranty period by having a tie up with brands directly? Just like what Flipkart started offering for few exclusive mobiles? I would any day pick up such hassle free service over deep discounts. Won’t say discounts are bad, I myself will dig into the best deals any day but discounting to an unfair extent of loosing money from their pocket is unfair business practice. Buy at Rs. 1000, have over heads of Rs. 100 and sell at a mere profit of Rs. 1 making it a total of Rs. 1101 but selling it at Rs. 990 or Rs. 900?

You might be happy for the time being that these brick and mortar stores are running out of business and they deserve it for all the extra money they minted for so long but a few things to note. These e-commerce portals are loosing out thousands of crores each year collectively, you think they are doing a charity? We as customers will be forced to shell it all out once the monopoly begins and that’s the danger we need to avoid. The same applies across all the fields, be it the net neutrality that people are fighting for or the anti-competitive clauses that apply across domains.

A live example that we have seen in recent years. Uber used to deeply discount the fares which led to many people get addicted to their service and convenience, this pushed many local autos to wrap up their service and look into other ways to earn. Now that people are addicted to the convenience of Uber and other options are subdued we as customers spend even up to 3X on uber. Now they are not only turning profitable but also minting that extra money due to lack of regulations set in place. Higher income from customers and much lower income for drives as they stopped most of the incentives and are paying lower fare/km for the drivers. In short, there are no free meals, we will someway or other pay for everything.

Coming back to the point of e-commerce sites. It fixed many broken pieces in the whole B2C cycle for various good but at the same time few tactics they use needs to be monitored and kept in check.

https://dazeinfo.com/2019/01/28/paytm-mall-shut...