It was the time when e-commerce in India was at a nascent stage and to earn some additional income, Jain started digital affiliate marketing for companies based out of US and UK. Surprisingly she started earning more than her salary. Hence, instead of promoting international brands, in 2012, Jain decided to introduce the concept of CashBack in India with her husband Aman Jain, Co-Fouder, GoPaisa.
At that time, she was just 24 years old and most of the brands did not take the concept seriously. She mentioned that the concept of CashBack was non-existent, everyone believed that CashBack as concept would never work.
Our strong belief and understanding of the Indian psyche made us invest and be patient towards growing the Cashback eco system. GoPaisa growth numbers spoke for us and showed our partners and family members. On the b2b side we were able to deliver to customers at lowest possible cost and also because we work on CPS model i.e we charge a brand only for sales and not for the traffic, added Jain.
Around 550+ brands associated with GoPaisa such as Flipkart, Paytm, Dominos, Makemytrip and many more waiting to be listed.
Jain informed that the biggest challenge which a new customer finds hard to understand is why does cashback come back after 30-45 days of order delivery even though he or she has the product and is using it. The main reason Cashback/Coupon and affiliated websites don’t give this cashback back to the user after delivery is the general return policy of 15-30 days which most of the retailers have.
However, GoPaisa has its own innovation by way of Instant Cashback deals where for categories where return is not possible such as recharges or food delivery, its allowing and crediting instant cashback to users accounts.
We are hoping with time we will be able to convince and more and more retailers to get on for instant cashbacks and cutting the time period where we can confirm the cashback in users account. This we believe would help the entire ecosystem, where we would be able to push higher sales to merchants and users- who would have greater faith in the system as they be getting their cashback faster, opined Jain.
As this industry is evolving, trends are also changing rapidly. Jain mentioned that a very healthy overall trend with the numbers which have been noticed of late is the emergence of smaller players who are coming to forth and taking fight with big boys of ecommerce. Be it Paytm which has become a household name now, was relatively very small and not present in ecommerce game in 2014.
Jain informed that fashion category in itself has gone into major change in 2014. While in 2014 fashion was ruled by category leaders such as Jabong, LimeRoad, Myntra, Koovsetc now fashion has become quite democratized with horizon talks such as Flipkart Amazon Snapdeal etc having very large collection providing credible alternative for shopping.
Next, within fashion offline and online boundaries are fading away with players getting into each other markets. While it is no secret with players such as Freecultr and Faballey have set offline stores, and Myntras news of acquiring a major offline retailer.
On the other hand big offline brands such as Jockey, Aditya Birla Group, Biba, Kazo, Montecarloetc setting up dedicated online stores and looking at the business aggressively. Even big critics of online retailing like Future group and have started tie-ups with big online horizontal players such as Amazon and Snapdeal to provide online stores within their respective sites.
Jain believes in growing the business rather than just running after the valuation games. Thus, GoPaisa is bootstrapped and a profitable venture.
A team of 30 members is managing day to day operations at GoPaisa and it has a dense user base of over million plus and around 40 per cent are returning users. Jain informed that the venture is growing at a faster pace by adding 5000-6000 new users every day.
Mobile apps and desktop shopping trends differential behaviour is also something interesting aspect which we have noticed with launching of our app. with our app we have seen massive adoption of online saving habit in tier 3, 4 and beyond too or in other words adoption in Bharat, expressed Jain.
GoPaisa receives 40 per cent of its traffic from mobile. Prior to the launch of app, 75 per cent traffic was coming from tier I and II cities. However, after the launch of app, the usage statistic is almost half and half for tier I&II and tier III-IV and beyond.
Road ahead
According to Jain, Cashback is the being considered as most effective tool, because the customer gets rewarded only once he has kept the product. Best part is the brand only pays for performance i.e sales and not for traffic or leads. So for the brand it’s the most effective way of marketing.
This article was earlier published on IndianMediaBook http://www.indianmediabook.com/startup-of-the-week-gopaisa-plans-to-get-into-offline-shopping-by-the-end-of-2016/
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