New chat feature launch by Paytm scheduled for later this month

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Aug 2, 2017

With a user base of over 230 million, Paytm aims to launch a service that will help uses communicate with them as well as other businesses.

Following a big push by the Indian Government to open up communication and grievance handling procedures in the e-commerce sector, Paytm has announced that it will launch its own chat function to make it easier to handle such matters.

Paytm is the largest marketplace and mobile commerce platform in India and is used by many e-commerce sites as a viable payment method. The move to launch a chat feature is similar to what happened when Tencent developed WeChat in China. However, whilst Paytm is an online payment service launching a chat service, the opposite is the case for both Hike Messenger and WhatsApp, which are two chat services that are working on enabling payments on their app. The Business Head of WhatsApp also sits on the board of Paytm.

Locally launched mobile payment apps are more popular in Asia than western imports. For example, although a household name in the west, PayPal has failed to gain the same popularity in India as Paytm and Alipay and WeChat dominate in China where they were first created.

Although Paytm is optimistic about the launch of their chat feature, Flipkart failed with the launch of their online messaging service Ping and so success is not guaranteed. However, the advantage that Paytm has is that their customer base is one of the largest in the country. Paytm became one of the highest valued business in India after its May round of funding and the launch of a chat function could indeed help aid its continued growth.