Paytm Mall gears up for competition from JioMart and Amazon – set to onboard 10,000 kirana stores for hyperlocal grocery delivery

• Paytm Mall now plans to add an additional onboard 10,000 kirana stores, small shops, and businesses for hyperlocal deliveries. It claims to have 100,000 merchants onboard.
• The company will now start grocery delivery across 100 cities in India.
• Paytm Mall is betting on the Online to Offline model – a model that has also got the attention of bigwigs like Reliance, Amazon etc.

Indian e-commerce platform Paytm Mall is doubling down on its merchant reach. The subsidiary of Paytm parent company One97 Communications, Paytm Mall now plans to bring an additional 10,000 kirana stores, small shops, and businesses onboard, for hyperlocal deliveries.

With this move, the company will now start grocery delivery across 100 cities in India. Paytm Mall claims that it already has 100,000 merchants onboard.

“Paytm Mall has always advocated a 100% marketplace model of operation against an inventory-led one as pursued by other major players. Our objective is to connect neighborhood offline stores to interested customers far and wide through our e-commerce platform. We are constantly reaching out to smaller sellers to understand the challenges they are facing in stocking inventory as well as the delivery of goods," said Srinivas Mothey, Senior Vice President, Paytm Mall.

Paytm Mall is betting on the Online to Offline model – a switch it had made in December, 2018. However, this model has been gaining relevance of late as bigwigs like Reliance, Amazon too are partnering with kirana stores to boost supply.

Reliance, through JioMart, plans to partner with kirana stores and leverage its latest partnership with Facebook to use WhatsApp to reach out to consumers. Meanwhile, Amazon too has started listing local shops on its platform.

With the coronavirus lockdown, online orders for grocery have shot up. Paytm Mall said that grocery store owners are seeing almost 50% additional orders per day.

But there are still challenges. “Digitally enabling small businesses by selling on Paytm Mall and giving them all the necessary logistics support, the company hopes to help shops and stores which have either witnessed a sharp decline in footfall or had to abruptly pause operations due to the lockdown. Many of the stores, while they have the inventory, are running short on manpower as many of their employees have returned to their hometowns,” said the company’s statement.

To overcome these, Paytm Mall is also connecting these local stores with logistics partners for delivery.

See Also:
Ola Driver Fund report card: Ride hailing app claims to have helped 9,000 drivers and delivered 650,000 kgs of essential supplies
India is one of the most Coronavirus-affected nations in Asia