Paytm Mall, the online retail venture backed by Alibaba, is targeting a gross merchandise value (GMV) of $9 billion by the end of 2018, its Chief Operating Officer Amit Sinha said on Wednesday. GMV, a metric commonly used in the e-commerce space, means sale price charged to the customer multiplied by the number of items sold. For example, if a company sells 10 books at Rs 100, the GMV is Rs 1,000.
The company recently received $110 million in funding from SoftBank and Alibaba. Unlike the biggies Flipkart and Amazon, Paytm Mall follows O2O, or the online-to-offline model. It essentially means that customers can walk into brick and mortar stores, scan product QR codes, browse information and make purchases via the Paytm Mall app.
The company said on Wednesday that it has doubled its market share in the last six months till December 2017, from 7 per cent to 15 per cent. It has 75,000 shopkeepers on its platform and currently delivers to more than 25,000 pin codes. Sinha said the company is targeting having 3 lakh shopkeepers on the platform by the end of this year.
Paytm Mall on Wednesday announced a strategic partnership with ASUS India for the exclusive launch of the ASUS VivoBook X507. It also launched its connected PoS solution for retail stores, empowering shopkeepers to manage their offline and online customers. With the new PoS solution, stores will be able to manage their inventory on the cloud with complete visibility on the available/required stock, view their sales, manage pending orders etc.
The Alibaba-backed company also introduced a 'digital experience zone' to simplify the buying procedure for customers. These are digitally interactive screens placed in the partner retail stores, providing a whole range of product catalogues available from the respective brand.