With increasing smartphone penetration and better internet connectivity, India is moving towards digital commerce. Consumers are buying product and services from e-commerce platforms which are hundreds of kilometres away, even though the demand could have been fulfilled locally. Fundamentally, discoverability, and convenience of transacting online, are steering India toward e-commerce adoption.
Gurgaon based PayMango brings the same level of discoverability and convenience of transaction to local commerce, albeit with fundamental changes in the engagement model.
By default, local commerce has greater advantages than buying online; there is strong local relevance and trust (and hence strong merchant-customer network), and instant satisfaction. And with mobiles upstaging every other form of human interaction, local commerce has a lot more to gain fromthat than e-commerce does. Gajinder Singh, Co-Founder and CEO, PayMango, says,
A simple engagement model build, on top of a discoverability engine, has the potential to disrupt the way local commerce functions in the country.
The brainchild of IIT-D alumni Gajinder and Ram Singla, PayMango is a horizontal mobile marketplace, which matches demand with local supply. For consumers, it is a gateway to discover, engage, and transact that covers local stores, merchandise, deals, promotions and events across all categories. For merchants, it acts as a hyper-local sales and customer acquisition platform.
Merchants can acquire, interact and transact with their customers, giving them the level of convenience that e-commerce offers, yet working in a model which they’re currently accustomed to.
Prior to PayMango, Gajinder created and scaled the PayU platform from scratch to about 100K transactions a day, when he was CTO at the Naspers-backed company. Ram served Zomato as CTO and created the much acclaimed Zomato mobile app.
After that, both Gajinder and Ram worked together in Tradus to create a proximity buying based marketplace, and thereafter were commissioned by Snapdeal to create and launch their payment engine KlickPay.
By using PayMango, merchants can get leads by listing on the marketplace with whom they can engage. They can then convert this engagement into sales and transactions, all within the same platform. Gajinder says,
They can also create and target promotions hyper-locally, to give a inorganic yet efficient boost to their sales
PayMango is in the process of listing the stores of Gurgaon, and will be live in a beta version by end of this month. The company has already raised over INR one crore of seed funding from successful Internet/financial entrepreneurs, mostly from the founders’ IIT network. “Funding is mostly being used to build the product and acquire the local supply in Gurgaon,” says Ram.
With PayMango, merchants can offer mobile invoices and remote cashless payments, and also view analytics on their campaigns and customer base. The platform offers them a depth of hyper-local segmentation on their customer base, by crowdsourcing data about the end consumers, learning about their interests in markets, locations, categories and buying behaviour.
Ram and Gajinder (R)
Besides their seed round, PayMango is in advance talk to raise over $1 million Series A funding from a VC firm. Founded in October 2014, PayMango will generate revenue primarily through lead generation, that could vary from INR 5 to 100 depending upon the merchant category.
According to PayMango’s estimate, the current market opportunity of the space is about $16 billion, much bigger than e-commerce. This is expected to grow to $80 billion by 2020. “As more and more people jump onto the mobile internet bandwagon, this will scale up very fast,” adds Ram.
Of late, entrepreneurs have focused on developing vertical solutions in the hyper-local space. While Grofers, Savegenie and Peppertap are catering to grocery, FMCG etc., there are few in services. Ram concludes,
We will be the first horizontal aggregation of local supply across all categories.
