Taking one step forward in the direction of digital payment business, Flipkart has launched its own digital wallet – ‘Flipkart Money’. It also allows Flipkart to take over other similar services in the market and make a strong foothold in the payments industry.
Payments is one of the four pillars of Flipkart, apart from Logistics, e-commerce and advertising, said Binny Bansal, Co-founder of the company.
Flipkart acquired major stakes in FX Mart for Rs 45.4 crores, which owns a coveted prepaid license issued by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to make a payment service on its platform. This has allowed Flipkart to develop a wallet of its own and reduce the turnaround times for refunds and returns.
According to the company, this will reduce the cost of paying to external wallet companies like Paytm and Freecharge and also allow them to directly make refunds to its own wallet, instead of refunding to cards or bank accounts.
The wallet is live on Flipkart’s smartphone app and can be accessed to make payments on its own marketplace.Users can hold a balance of Rs 10,000 with a monthly top-up limit of Rs 25,000. Top-ups can be done using credit cards, debit cards or through net banking.
The digital wallet is right now Flipkart-only, so you won’t be able to use it for any other service, which is quite disappointing considering other services like Ola Money and Paytm allow transactions at multiple merchants.
Other services that the flipkart wallet would provide are allowing higher discounts and cashbacks on the products listed on their website which will help in attracting more customers and also allow Flipkart to keep the money within themselves and the customer, forcing the customer to spend it on Flipkart only.
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