Paytm, always one step ahead to ensure it competes with the ever growing ecommerce market in India, has recently launched an inbuilt messaging app. This feature, which was initially rolled out in August, is now going to be available for Android phones.
The new “inbox” feature comes as an attempt to create a separate path in the fierce world of ecommerce. Paytm ensured its new service lets users send and receive images and text messages. Not only that, the service also offers multiplayer games through the messaging app. Users get notifications on latest offers and cashback. This app comes equipped with cricket and trivia based games as well.
Paytm, backed by Alibaba and SoftBank among others, is embedding its product with social features to give an additional advantage against other messaging apps. The other apps are increasingly encroaching on Paytm’s territory by introducing payment features of their own. In what seems to be a cheeky response to WhatsApp’s latest update, Paytm announced that its messaging service will come with a recall option that lets users delete messages once sent.
Hike, backed by Tencent, added a mobile wallet feature this year; WhatsApp is set to introduce business payments on its app and WeChat has been trying hard to gain traction in the Indian ecommerce system through its messaging and ordering app.
Paytm is India’s largest online payment app and claims to have over 200 million users. “We have realized that besides making payments, our users and merchants also like to communicate with each other. There is a need of (sic) social messaging, commerce and payments seamlessly blending into one another,” Paytm senior VP Deepak Abbot said in a statement.