NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, August 20, 2015

BENGALURU: Mobile payments and ecommerce application Paytm is launching a messenger function directly connecting buyers and sellers. The feature, due to launch in the fall, is taken from the mobile-commerce model popular in China, founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma told ET. 

"In China, everyone is talking to customers and merchants before they shop. We probably need to bring this to India, where consumers can bargain with the merchant," he said. 

Chinese chat application WeChat, owned by telecom giant Tencent, started four years ago as a simple chat application. Before long, it incorporated payment capabilities and eventually expanded into mobile commerce, where any merchant and buyer can interact in-app before closing a sale. Today, millions of users transact everyday using WeChat. According to estimates by Nomura, WeChat makes $7 (about Rs 477) in revenue on average per user, seven times that of Whatsapp. Paytm appears to be building complementary capabilities backward -started as a mobile wallet in 2014, the service now nears 100-million users and launched its ecommerce marketplace in April.