Earlier this month, Paytm, an online utility payments company, launched a mobile-only marketplace for physical goods, allowing users to purchase clothes and apparels via mobile. This is a fairly drastic shift for a company, but not unfamiliar for Paytm: Paytm itself was incubated within One97 (which is a mobile VAS company) launched in a fairly active online recharge market, added bus ticketing to its mandate, and now a mobile only marketplace. In a market full of e-commerce marketplaces (Flipkart, eBay, Snapdeal, Shopclues, among others), why another one, and why only mobile? The other interesting development is the integration of the Plustxt messenger with Paytm, allowing buyers to negotiate with sellers for a bargain, so how do they define parameters for bargaining, and how does this scale across hundreds of thousands of merchants? There is also the fact that Paytm waited till it had a semi-closed prepaid license in place, and has to manage a shift of customers from a closed wallet to a semi-closed wallet. We spoke at length about the Paytm marketplace with One97 CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma and here's part I of the interaction: MediaNama: Why have you launched a marketplace? Vijay Shekhar Sharma: If you look at a logical flow, it’s been about going from building a robust back-end to building a sincere front-end product for consumers. In 2010, we did a payment offering called Paytm Payments. We never launched it publicly. We found out that the only way to launch our product in the market was with…
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