acked by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, PayTM launched its PayTM mall in India, an Android app for smartphones, patterned after Alibaba's TMall, to compete with rivals Flipkart and Amazon in the country's online shopping market, Business Standard reported.
Last year, India's e-commerce industry was marked by the collapse of Askme while Snapdeal and Flipkart cut jobs and reduce expenses to earn better profits.
The growth of the country's e-commerce industry also fell about 15 times to 12 percent at $14.5 billion last year as Indian firms focused more on raising funds to challenge Amazon, the report said. In 2015, the industry posted earnings of $13 billion, a growth of about 180 percent from the previous year.
Despite this, Alibaba has raised its investments in India's online e-commerce market, as it infused as much as $200 million into PayTM, turning it into a unicorn company with a value of around $1 billion.
In a bid to dominate India's online shopping market, the Chinese e-commerce giant also expanded its product offering to more than 0.14 million Indian sellers and established 17 fulfilment centers to speed up the delivery of goods.
To challenge Amazon, PayTM will add about one billion products from worldwide sellers to its shopping cart, which will include those from Southeast Asia, particularly from Alibaba's investments in Lazada with its huge base in Indonesia.
PayTM also plans to launch the offering of its one billion products in August, the report said.
Sources said that Amazon has around 500 million products while Flipkart and Snapdeal have 50 million products.
"PayTM would play on Alibaba's strength. For products the company would bring in sellers from Lazada, sellers from other countries as the Chinese major's ties in the U.S. and Europe. The operations would be 10 times of what PayTM's operations are right now in the next two years," the source was quoted as saying.
PayTM assured Indian consumers that they will offer quality and authentic products on their platform, which is a combination of mall and bazaar concept.
"Consumers would continue to get the largest assortment of domestic and international products through PayTM Bazaar, which will also be featured on the new app," Saurabh Vashishtha, PayTM vice president, said.