​Paytm joins hands with Flipkart for timely deliveries

Noida-headquartered online marketplace Paytm has decided to join hands with e-commerce giant Flipkart’s logistics platform Ekart. It is piloting a service where goods shipped from Paytm will be delivered by Ekart. This is hinting at an approaching collaboration between the leader of the market Flipkart and its fast-growing rival.

"We are integrating Ekart with our network of logistics players to offer end-to-end experience for both consumers and sellers," said Sudhanshu Gupta, head of business at Paytm.

Ekart is also looking forward to roping in a rival online marketplace, as it wants to fashion itself into an independent business and not depend only on Flipkart.

Talking of Paytm, the collaboration would help it in building a greater focus on smaller towns and cities, from where it gets more than half of total orders from the total of 1 lakh orders per day.

"Ekart will be an interesting experiment for us," Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm’s CEO told ET. "Since we are a marketplace, we work with different vendors to enable our merchants reach a wider consumer base."

Ever since Binny Bansal has become the CEO of Flipkart, Ekart has been seeing a rise in its collaborations. In the recent past, it has also begun a pilot to deliver shipments for Jabong, the online portal dealing in fashion.

"Ekart has the capability to transport over 5 lakh shipments from different sellers across India. We will be using the same capabilities to offer services to other companies," said Amitesh Jha, a VP at Ekart.

All three of India's top ecommerce companies viz Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal, have their in-house logistics companies, so that they can deliver timely shipments.

"Logistics is still broken in India and companies need to quickly build capabilities in ancillary areas and offer value-add services to customers in order to create a hook," said Prahlad Tanwar, director for transport and logistics at KPMG.

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