Flipkart’s digital payment arm PhonePe on Monday acquired hyperlocal point-of-sales startup Zopper Retail. However, the Bengaluru based e-commerce giant refused to disclose the exact valuation of the deal. The acquisition is expected to give a huge boost to PhonePe’s newly launched offline business. The company had launched its own point-of-sale (POS) device for small retailers only a month ago.
As per the acquisition deal, Zopper Retail’s entire team including CEO & founder Neeraj Jain will become part of the PhonePe’s operational team. Mr. Jain will now spearhead PhonePe’s offline business.
Commenting on acquisition, PhonePe’s CEO & co-founder Sameer Nigam said, “Zopper has a very strong technology and innovation DNA, and Neeraj and team are also a great culture fit for PhonePe. Zopper Retail is specifically designed to meet the needs of millions of small retailers in India, and their strategy ties in very well with our overall vision of making digital payments universally accepted across the country.”
Over the last one year, PhonePe has been aggressively trying to expand its offline merchant business. As part of this strategy, the company in November last year unveiled its own PoS device based on Bluetooth technology for small retailers, food chains and other merchants to accept online payment.
PhonePe is already one of the prominent players in the UPI payment space, where it competes with deep pocketed players like Alibaba backed Paytm, Google’s Tez and Indian govt owned Bhim pay.
Although PhonePe, Paytm and other player’s success in online payment space is vindication of the fact that digital payment in India is booming, even today most physical retail stores do not offer digital payment solution to their consumers. This mostly is owing to lack of availability of payment devices and this is where POS devices come into picture.
The main function of POS device is to connect retailers and small merchants with third party merchants and thereby help them to offer seamless digital payment solutions to their customers.