How Paytm is gearing up for the festive season

The firm will invest over Rs 1,000 crore in marketing, cash backs and promotional spends

Planning to make a splash this festive season for its first major sale Paytm Mall, owned by Paytm Ecommerce Pvt Ltd has prepared a Rs 1,000-crore (Rs 10 billion) war chest.

The recently-launched online mall app has brought in over a 1,000 brand stores and 15,000 brand-authorised retailers, selling over 65 million products.

Since this is the company’s first festival season sale since launch, it is aggressively getting shopkeepers and brand authorised stores on board to offer better buying experience and faster deliveries.

The company will invest over Rs 1,000 crore in marketing, cash backs and promotional spends.

“Our promise is to offer customers the best and biggest offers from trusted retailers and make our platform the de-facto first choice for online shopping,” Amit Sinha, chief operating officer, Paytm Mall.

Paytm Mall recently added top bosses from Alibaba Joseph Tsai and Michael Evans on its board of directors along with Zhang Yong, the company announced in its Registrar of Companies (RoC) filing.

The company last month revamped its mobile application as well.

To be different from the competition, Paytm Mall is making its sales live not only online but offline as well. In a first, it would be giving the same discounts and deals to its customers in partner stores, which it would give on its portal.

Taking its online-to-offline (O2O) strategy to the next level, the company has decided to make the sale event relevant for its vast number of offline merchants.

“For the festival season, we have planned a number of special offers for our shopkeepers and retailers. Brands hate it when online offer discounts and offline stores suffer.

We want to make the experience same online and offline, as our customer and sellers are in both worlds,” Sinha had said earlier.

He added that at the Paytm Mall app, customers would have the option of ordering online or picking it up from a partner store.

While the company kick-started the sale season with an Independence Day sale, its keeping its game plan, sale calendar as well as the name of the sale under wraps.

This the first major feastive season for Paytm Mall, formed after being spun off from the mobile wallet in February this year.

Bazaar, which is the unstructured shopping channel on Paytm, will also be featured on a new app.

It will aim at providing consumers the widest domestic and international assortment.

While the parent company One97 Communications is backed by Alibaba, Sinha said that the company is taking a different strategy and would be relying mostly on local retailers and sellers.

Photograph: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters