This article has been contributed by Akshat Saxena, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Froker.
The commerce industry has always been at the forefront of adopting technological innovations to enhance customer experiences and operational efficiency. This ongoing evolution is reshaping the landscape of commerce through quick commerce, which is gradually revolutionizing shopping experiences. The Indian quick commerce sector presently boasts a market value of $700 million. It is on the cusp of substantial expansion, fueled by key technological trends. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and the emergence of social commerce are pivotal to this growth. They are not just changing the way businesses operate but also how a young, tech-savvy population interacts with the digital marketplace.
Quick commerce is making the user experience more seamless, personalized, and altered as per the online world. This evolution, driven by increased smartphone penetration and AI’s transformative potential, is paving the way for a future where quick commerce is not just about quick transactions but about creating immersive, intuitive, and engaging consumer journeys. The government’s role in fostering such innovation is crucial, as it can provide the necessary support and framework for these technologies to thrive, ensuring a sustainable and efficient ecosystem for startups.
Let’s look at some of the tech-driven trends that are transforming the quick commerce landscape.
Social Commerce Is the New Frontier in Customer Engagement
Social commerce, the amalgamation of e-commerce with social media platforms, is revolutionizing the way consumers discover and purchase products. This trend is not just about selling through social media. It is about creating an entire shopping experience that is seamless, engaging, and personalized. Social commerce taps into the user’s social network, preferences, and online behaviour to offer a curated shopping experience that’s both intuitive and enjoyable.
Personalization of Searches Through Generative AI
Generative AI search is redefining how customers find products and services online. Unlike traditional search algorithms that rely on keyword matching, generative AI can easily understand and interpret user queries in a more human-like manner. This new-age technology can generate product recommendations and search results that are highly personalized as per the user’s past behaviour, preferences, and even current trends. The result is a more intuitive search experience that helps users discover products that they are more likely to purchase.
AI Assistants to Enhance Customer Support and Interaction
AI assistants, or AI buddies, are becoming integral to the commerce industry. These AI-powered tools can handle a range of tasks, from answering customer queries to providing personalized shopping advice. Unlike traditional chatbots, these AI assistants are capable of learning and evolving based on customer interactions, making them more efficient and effective over time. They can handle a high volume of queries simultaneously, ensuring that customer support is swift and efficient.
AI-enabled content moderation is crucial in social commerce, where user-generated content plays a significant role. AI can quickly analyse vast amounts of data, flagging and removing inappropriate or harmful content, thus maintaining the integrity and safety of the platform. This technology is not only for protecting users but also for preserving the brand’s reputation.
At the same time, AI is being used by startups for predictive analytics, which is used to forecast trends, consumer behaviour, and potential market shifts with remarkable accuracy. This foresight allows for more targeted and effective marketing strategies, ensuring that companies are always a step ahead. Going ahead, the use of AI for protected user experiences and targeted marketing efforts will gain stronger ground in the world of commerce.
Tech-Enabled Supply Chain Optimization
AI and other emerging technologies are rapidly transforming supply chains around the world, including in India. AI systems can analyze huge amounts of data to accurately forecast demand, automatically adjust inventory levels, and optimize delivery routes in real-time. This can contribute significantly to making their supply chains smarter and more efficient. According to a report by PwC, 54% of firms in India are now utilizing AI. With the ongoing technological adoption across industries, the use of tech-enabled supply chains will continue to expand.
Moreover, AI has the power to drive greater sustainability and introduce more ethical practices across quick commerce in India. AI-enabled systems can closely monitor production and distribution chains to detect areas for reducing waste, minimizing environmental impact, and addressing labour, safety, or diversity issues in operations.
The Emergence of Virtual Stores and AR Experiences
The online shopping landscape in India is rapidly evolving with the emergence of immersive technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual stores. E-commerce players are integrating AR tools to allow customers to visually try on products and even place items in their actual living spaces before buying. This technology not only boosts customer engagement but also helps reduce return rates by providing a clearer idea of the product before purchase.
Conclusion
The Indian quick commerce industry is poised to reach $5 billion in revenue by 2025, driven by the rapid adoption of advanced and futuristic technologies that are revolutionizing supply chain transparency, optimizing inventory, and elevating customer experiences. Here, government initiatives can enable a regulatory environment fostered through supportive digital infrastructure policies, public-private partnerships, and funding for emerging technology research.
With a tech-empowered consumer base eager for faster deliveries, India can harness innovation responsibly to meet growth targets and establish global AI leadership. By combining commercial interests with ethics and social welfare through government vision and oversight, India can witness resilient tech-enabled advancement in commerce.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by ePayLater.
While there was a time when people used to borrow money only for fulfilling major goals like building a house or starting a business, the scenario is quite different today. Millennials today do not hesitate to borrow for meeting their lifestyle goals like shopping or travelling.
As per a report published by Paisabazaar, India’s largest digital marketplace for financial products, credit awareness in Indians is on a steady rise. According to the report, the young salaried segment of Indians have more credit awareness, maintain better credit scores, and are more confident about borrowing money.
Again, a recent report by digital lending platform, India Lends says that there has been a 55% growth in personal loans for travel purposes.
Considering this shift from the ‘save first’ philosophy to the ‘consume first and pay overtime’ way of life, and to fulfill the aspirations of the new Indians, ePayLater, a Fintech startup is providing short-term credit at the point of sale. The startup also meets the short-term credit needs of small businesses. Here’s the success story of ePayLater covering all about the startup, its Founders and Team, Name and Logo, Funding and Investors, Revenue Model, Competitors, Growth, Awards and Recognition, Future Plans and more.
ePayLater is a checkout lending platform, which provides credit at the point of sale. ePayLater offers the simplest possible checkout experience in existence today, providing customers with the ability to conclude a transaction with just a click of the mouse or a tap of the touchscreen.
It is a ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ solution through which customers can get access to an instant credit limit to make faster purchases, that too without having to pay at the same time.
There are two Major Product Lines of the Company –
Providing short-term credit at the point of sale for consumers shopping for their personal needs.
Here, ePayLater enables a “Buy Now, Pay Later” solution for frequent online purchasers with an interest-free credit term of 14 days. ePayLater has partnered with IRCTC, PVR, MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Easemytrip, Tata Croma, Travelyaari among many others.
Providing short-term credit for individual retailers for their business needs.
The service involves no hidden cost and the credit line extended is completely collateral-free. This allows businesses to continue providing services to their customers and achieve higher sales through faster inventory churns. ePayLater provides businesses credit in the form of a line of credit, short-term loans, and merchant cash advances.
Driving volume is always key to merchants. However, payment failures result in a drop in volume and this is generally not in the hands of the merchant. A typical payment process involves going to a payment gateway, then to a bank, then the user is sent back from the bank to the payment gateway, and then to the merchant.
One-click checkout
If there is an issue at any link, the payment fails. Many times the user may not even return to the merchant and can’t even retry. This problem is completely eliminated by ePayLater by providing 1 click checkout.
ePayLater also counters the high incidence of cash in P2M ( Person to Merchant) transactions. For customers who prefer cash-on-delivery, ePayLater gives customers the same benefits (like receiving the goods before deducting payment) in a cashless manner.
For offline transactions, where cash is predominant in India, ePayLater’s UPI based solution gives customers an incentive to move away from cash since one can transact on credit.
High success rate and transaction security
Further, the time and the number of steps taken to do a transaction using credit, debit, net banking is significantly higher compared to a few seconds on ePayLater. Since the customer never leaves the portal (which the customer does in case of credit/debit/net banking/wallet transactions), ePayLater can easily guarantee a very high success rate and transaction security.
Benefits of epayLater
In a nutshell, ePayLater’s benefits for consumers are threefold. First, it’s Buy Now, Pay Later functionality; second, the enabling of a single-tap checkout process; and third, its ability to safeguard consumer information from unnecessary dissemination.
ePayLater – Funding and Investors
In total, ePayLater has raised over $15.7 mn funding in 4 rounds (February 2021).
Recently, ePayLater closed the Pre-series A funding led by ICICI Bank and GMO Global Fintech Fund, an investment fund of the internet conglomerate in Japan along with family offices like Parekh and Patni and foreign investors from the UK.
Akshat Saxena, Aurko Bhattacharya and Uday Somayajula are the founders of ePayLater.
Akshat Saxena – Co-Founder, ePayLater
Akshat Saxena
An engineer by qualification from DA-IICT Gandhinagar, Mr. Akshat Saxena is a management specialist in Marketing and Information Systems with an MBA degree from the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon (MDI). Akshat carries a cross-sectional experience of setting up and managing data-driven businesses.
In his 12 years of professional experience, he has worked extensively in the BFSI, credit, and payment space, and has endeavored to solve business problems with technology and data solutions. Prior to embarking upon his entrepreneurial journey, he worked with majors like Oracle, IBM, SAP, and TransUnion.
Aurko Bhattacharya – Co-founder
Aurko Bhattacharya
Mr. Aurko Bhattacharya is an engineer by qualification from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (IIT Roorkee). Aurko is a management specialist with an MBA degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta(IIM-C).
Aurko carries Banking experience dealing with structured investment solutions across Equity, Interest Rates, and Foreign Exchange. In his 12 years of professional experience, he has worked with industry majors like ICICI Bank and Barclays Wealth and Investment Management.
Uday Somayajula, Co-founder
Uday Somayajula
Mr. Uday Somayajula is an engineer and management specialist in Finance with an MBA degree from the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon (MDI). Uday is experienced in multiple areas of banking, capital markets, and risk consulting. In his 12 years of professional experience, he has worked with industry majors like ICICI Bank and Accenture Management Consulting.
ePayLater runs with an employee strength of 51-200 employees, as per its Linkedin profile.
Market and Industry Details
With a credit card penetration of just 2% in the country and less than 10% of SMEs having access to credit, ePayLater has huge growth headroom.
The team at ePayLater arrived at the solution after intensive market research and interviews with people. Market studies showed that “pay later” products not only result in a higher transaction success rate for merchants but also bring in new customers who previously did not have access to credit.
Successful models in the USA and Europe were studied. Studies clearly demonstrated the fact that paying later products result in significantly higher transaction success, provides a better customer experience to users.
With India being on the path of an e-commerce revolution, this was the perfect time to build a “Pay Later” for India and give the much-needed credit boost and checkout convenience to people. ePayLater aims to make credit more accessible and convenient for the growing population of India.
ePayLater – Startup Story | How was ePayLater Business Started?
ePayLater was founded in December 2015, while the idea started a few months prior. Akshat, Aurko, and Udayhad been working in complementary sub-domains of BFSI and had a consensus on the potential a mass-market credit offering can unlock.
The team was amazed at the fact that despite the great strides being made by the economy and therefore retail consumption, the credit penetration remained abysmally low.
In India, we have only around 40 million credit cardholders in a billion-plus population, which in terms of percentage penetration is way lower compared to the western counterparts. The founder trio had the vision to empower every fellow citizen with a credit instrument. And that’s how the idea of ePayLater was born.
In order to actualize the same, the team of ePayLater chose a path that was non-traditional yet congruent with trends- demographic and technology alike. They decided to build a purely digital credit offering, which would leverage the best of data science and engineering, and deliver an experience that is not just inclusive, but also superior.
ePayLater today underwrites customers using alternate data, in less than a second, thereby allowing them to be a true checkout credit method at points of sale, whether online or offline. Customers could get a credit limit in real-time, and use it to ‘Book/Buy Now and Pay Later’, irrespective of their geographical presence.
The idea behind starting the company was to use data science and new-age technologies to solve real-life challenges and bridge the credit divide that exists in India today. ePayLater is a team of dynamic professionals with a goal to optimize the digital payment experience and make it seamless, reliable and secure – says Akshat.
ePayLater is a fintech company that stands as a zero-cost credit solution for SMEs, which helps them easily purchase their supplies. With this, the company aims to reduce the trust deficit that typically exists in the digital B2B commerce market.
ePayLater earns revenue from the transaction fee that is charged from the merchants. Another source of revenue is the penal charges levied on overdue payments.
ePayLater – Competitors
Some competitors of ePayLater are:
LazyPay
Simpl
Paytm Postpaid
KrazyBee
Quiklo
SlicePay
However ePayLater’s USPis its product that serves the NTC (New to Credit), non-urban residents as well as it solves the challenges of urban elites. At ePayLater, the platform leverages sophisticated algorithms that have the capacity to cater to wide and differing audiences in an inclusive way.
They have built a product that’s serving the under-served, non-urban residents as well as it solving the challenges of the urban elites.
For instance, IRCTC sees traffic from the biggest metros and the smallest towns, catering to customers of different ages that often lack credit histories. In spite of these challenges, ePayLater’s algorithms, created using advanced data science and analytics, have been able to determine their creditworthiness based on several parameters other than credit history. This made it possible for the company to solve real-life problems by disbursing credit to the right people.
ePayLater – Advisors and Mentors
Stefan van den Berg, founder and former CEO of AfterPay, a provider of ‘pay after delivery’ payment services in Western Europe and the ANZ region, has joined ePayLater as a strategic advisor.
ePayLater’s focus on continuous innovation puts them in the lead every time in offering the most convenient, secure, and seamless experience to the customer.
To cite a specific example, the launch of ePayLater’s services on IRCTC created a wave of excitement amongst customers. Partnering with India’s largest online portal is a strong testimony to their technology and analytics leadership. ePayLater is considered to be one of the most convenient methods to purchase tickets on the IRCTC platform.
Also, ePayLater is India’s first UPI-powered credit solution. The team of ePayLater came up with an innovative solution to empower individuals to transact on credit anytime anywhere. They partnered with IDFC Bank to bring instant digital credit to individuals transacting online and offline, using BHIM UPI.
For the first time, digital credit is made possible using the BHIM UPI railroad, the instant real-time payment system developed by NPCI. This allows the customers to use ePayLater on all the major merchants like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Jabong, and Uber.
ePayLater – Awards and Recognition
ePayLater won the DigiDhan Mission Fintech Award for ‘Best Fintech Innovation in Digital Payments through Lending’ at the MeitY Startup Summit 2019 in October. The Minister of IT, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad awarded the startup the award.
ePayLater – Future Plans
ePayLater looks forward to introducing a bunch of innovations that would help them further simplify the customer experience, besides making credit more inclusive. Alongside, having solved the first set of business challenges their merchant partners were facing, ePayLater are broadening the vistas and gearing up for other business metrics that could be achieved.
The startup is looking at business credit as a major thrust area, as there lies a huge unmet demand for easy credit. ePayLater believes solving the said problem would unlock the true business potential of micro-entrepreneurs across the country.
On the back of its unique product and seamless execution, ePayLater is all set to cement its position as the leading facilitator of Digital Credit aimed at individuals and small businesses.
ePayLater – FAQs
Who founded ePayLater?
Aurko Bhattacharya, Akshat Saxena, Uday Somayajula, Prasannaa Muralidharan, Shanmu Thiagaraja are the founders of ePayLater.
When was ePayLater founded?
ePayLater was founded in 2015.
Who are the competitors of ePayLater?
LazyPay
Simpl
Paytm Postpaid
KrazyBee
Quiklo
SlicePay
Stc Pay
Unicard
Twid
Solfy
What is the total funding of ePayLater?
ePayLater has raised over $15.7 mn funding in 4 rounds (February 2021).
What is Pay Later payment?
When Customers make payment for the goods or services, money is not debited from their accounts. Payments are done by their providers. Customers pay the transaction amount back to the provider according to the fixed schedule as regulated by the provider.
Abira Dutta
