In a bid to lure more users and merchants to its payments platform, WhatsApp will roll out cashback starting this month. As reported by Reuters, WhatsApp’s cashback programme will focus on increasing the user base for its payments service, which is based on India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) infrastructure. Cashback of as much as Rs 33 per transaction is being planned for peer-to-peer payment transfers, while merchants are also likely to get similar incentives from the Meta-owned messaging app.
The development, although not yet confirmed by WhatsApp, comes close on the heels of the regulatory approval that allows the app to offer a payments service to 100 million users in India — WhatsApp’s biggest market in the world with a base of more than half a billion users. WhatsApp piloted a payments service back in 2020, but it was able to roll out to more users only in 2021. The Reserve Bank of India put some restrictions on the expansion of the service to more users back then.
According to Reuters, WhatsApp will hand out a cashback of Rs 33 to users irrespective of the amount they transact. In other words, there will be no criteria for the minimum transfer to get the cashback amount. That, according to the report citing sources, will drive more users to the platform, which is already India’s most popular for instant messaging. By leveraging its customer base that uses the messaging service in India, WhatsApp is hoping to grow its payments platform and take on payments rivals, including Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay.
The Indian market is mostly driven by offers. In their nascent years, digital payments firms such as Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, MobiKwik, and Freecharge offered customers large amounts of cashback money to drive user growth. "You won't leave money on the table as an Indian," Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, was quoted as saying in the report.
WhatsApp told Reuters it is "running a campaign offering cashback incentives in a phased manner to our users as a way to unlock the potential of payments on WhatsApp."
The next phase of the campaign may include cashback incentives for users when they use WhatsApp’s payments service to pay highway tolls and utility bills from the app. WhatsApp will also test doling out cashback for mobile recharges and postpaid bill payments for Reliance Jio connections. Reliance is a partner of WhatsApp for several other services, including a chatbot for JioMart.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Welcome To My Blog.