Paytm turns its offline button on for festive season

Paytm, one of India's largest digital payment companies, which has risen its points sky high post demonetisation, is launching Rs 1212 Cashfree Festival', which the company described as its first offline shopping festival.

The NCR-based company is promising a range of offers including up to 100 percent cashbacks for digital payments made through its platform at 15 lakh offline stores in the country.

Some of the offers for customers paying through Paytm at these stores include free movie tickets, Uber rides, iPhones and tickets to T20 games.

These offers will be available at outlets ranging from the kirana stores to bigger brand outlets. Paytm has partnered with several major offline stores including Big Bazaar, Pantaloons, Spencer's, Heritage Fresh, Peter England, Allen Solly , Croma, The Mobile Store, Burger King and Pizza Hut.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO, Paytm, tweeted, "Paytm starts a new annual tradition of 12:12 in India. Go shop all around you and get cool offers." Sharma said that the 12 12 Cashfree Festival will be an annual event.

In a statement Sharma said, "The 1212 Cashfree Festival is aimed at celebrating the inclusive power of mobile payments and commerce. It marks our commitment to work closely with the offline merchant community to ensure that the smallest of vendors can accept mobile payments at their stores at zero cost. Going forward, we will continue to celebrate the day as an annual event that salutes the spirit of going cashfree."

Kiran Vasireddy, Senior Vice President told ET, "We are expecting to see a 3x to 5x jump in transactions through Paytm."

Arvind Singhal, Chairman, Retail consultancy firm Technopak, said, "This seems to be the first such promotion in India and certainly the first one at such a scale."

Paytm's largest investor, Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, has turned 1111, known as Single's Day in China, as one of the biggest annual online shop ping festivals. Paytm takes festivities offline with its rs 12|12 cashfree festival' Paytm takes festivities offline with its rs 12|12 cashfree festival' - Image Paytm is pushing for greater use of its online-to-offline transactions that it launched last year, which includes both QR code-based and OTP-based transactions.