This week has been a mixture of triumph and downfall in the startup industry. And this week have recorded some evolution in the Digital payment realm. Starting from the negatives, Aditya Birla group has decided the shut-down of its e-commerce venture Abof.com by the end of the year reasoning their inability to compete against the ruling giants Flipkart and Amazon. They announced that their employees will be credited with a four-and-a-half months’ salary as compensation if they decided to quit the company.
As we all know, this week had been a highly anticipated one because of the much-awaited flagship sales of the e-commerce lions. Since the day one, a competition prevailed on smartphone sales between Amazon and Flipkart. The Flipkart even claimed to have taken the lead over Amazon in smartphone sales on the opening day of the sales. However, the one mobile company seems to have made much out of the clash. Xiaomi has been sitting pretty having sold over one million smartphones within a span of 48 hours. They kind of took the saying ‘make hay while the sun shines’ way too seriously.
Google’s Tez app has been launched in India this week and claimed its success having raked over 410,000 active users who made transactions up to 1.8 crores within the first twenty hours of its launch. Since the digital payments have become an inevitable in our hectic-scheduled life, there had been a lot of expectations for the launch of Tez. Since it is based on UPI (United Payment Interface), now the users will be able to link more than one bank account and make the online transactions in a more secure and faster manner. The Google CEO has envisaged that this application would contribute toward the country’s digital transformation.
The Airtel Payment bank has announced the UPI integration recently with an aim to boost up its customer’s convenience. Now the users will be able to connect their Airtel payment bank accounts with the BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) application so that they can make all their secured online transactions through the UPI.
The Razorpay has announced four new products on its transformation to Razorpay 2.0 enhancing the digital payment automation. The products include Razorpay Route, Razorpay Smart Collect, Razorpay Subscriptions, and Invoices. Through these products, the company plans to reach the needful small businesses and help increase their market shares.
Another Big contribution from Google is that it has launched a new website ‘Startup with Google‘ for the startups, providing all the necessary resources including many of its own services to make them grow in their venture breaking all barriers. The starters will get everything they need to proceed with their ideas in this one-stop destination for all the startup needs.
The Zomato which seems to retain its good luck since its acquisition of the Runnr announced its ‘Zero commission model’ recently, setting its partner restaurants in a cloud nine mood. The company is claimed to be a profitable one making a good fortune out of all its branches over 24 Countries. Hence, the zero commission model is an encouragement to all its partner restaurant owners making them contribute more toward the Zomato’s growth. Change is the only constant. This week has seen a lot of changes in the Indian Startup ecosystem and it will continue in the weeks to come.