We've been seeing Paytm stickers coming in offline stores all over, at least in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. In the month of August, Paytm's offline merchant transactions exceeded online transactions on the platform, CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma (VSS) told MediaNama, and a large part of this has been owing to a change in technology approach by the company. The company claims over half a million offline merchants now. Edited excerpts from MediaNama's interview with VSS: Took a call to focus on offline in 2016: "Every year we pick up a theme. When we first started, it was online recharges, the second year was online payment. Now, this year when we started we thought we would take up offline as a plan that we would have Paytm in every nook and corner (of the country). We thought that after Paytm, there should not be any pain-point left for anyone else to solve. Online is great, online is nice and but this is where the bus is moving. But ultimately there is a larger customer base and transaction base which happens in the offline world. It was a very, I would say, uncanny for an online company to think of offline. So we built our own software where we can track offline signups, sales-force automation and a lot things, so that we are disciplined. And I think we have more than half a million merchants signed up. Update: VSS has clarified that the company refers to a transaction as "offline" when the merchant doesn't have…
