Pay1: Rejuvenating the Unorganised Retailer and Creating Micro Entrepreneurs

In the 7 years of its existence and bootstrapping its way to success, the Pay1 story is rather promising. Lead by a sterling team of visionaries, Pay1 is focused on building a platform for unorganised retailers to offer consolidated services which will increase their revenue streams. Alakh Gargiya, the incoming CEO and one of the first independent investors in the company says, “Our vision is to create micro-entrepreneurs to make a sustainable impact in one of the sunrise sectors in India’s retail, the unorganised sector.”

So far developed markets like the US have been the cradle for disruptive innovation; however, emerging markets are at the inflection point now. India and Southeast Asia are leading the evolution of transformative business models in the retail industry. Pay1 believes that emerging markets have redefined the retail formats and digital commerce. India has the potential to become an innovation lab for affordable, localised technology solutions.

Value proposition:

Over the last couple of years, Indian retail and payments landscape has mirrored the global digitalisation push. It is now imperative for retail businesses to join the digital and technological bandwagon, or perish. This is where retail-tech platforms like Pay1 are gaining traction. By providing an easy-to-use technology platform, pay1 resuscitates the unorganized retailer and helps add revenue streams.

The unorganised mom- and –pop stores are limited by the lack of technology, capital and product width. The ‘kirana’ store does not have the technology to manage inventory, analyse customer preferences and access to trending products/services.

Pay1 aims at providing technology for efficient inventory management, customer buying behaviour analysis, new products and trends, forecasting demand, offering discounts, bunching highest selling products as a part of the platform. It also provides solutions like bill payments, mobile recharge and remittances. The platform will partner up with the banks to become a full-service digital payment solution.

Another problem that unorganised retailers face is the inefficient utilisation of infrastructure in terms of space available inside and outside the store. Pay1 aims at introducing products/ services and partnerships wherein the retailer can leverage its current infrastructure. Pay1 will partner with logistics companies and make the retailer location their drop box, collection centre or depository (mini-warehouse) to enable the retailer to monetise the infrastructure. This will increase the footfall and incremental revenue.

Partnership with ATMs, marketing and promotion of third party products and services by banners/ hoardings, surveys and pamphlets are on the cards on the pay1 platform. Pay1 is also in prospective partnership with the banks and NBFCs to provide microcredit to the retailer.

In order to open channels for sustainable growth and revenue, the Pay1 platform will enable B2B commerce where the retailer will interact directly with the supplier; this eliminates middle-men and reduces costs.

The differentiating factor of pay1 is that it also provides a superior distribution channel to products and services to launch themselves on this platform and reach the offline unorganised retail segment in India. Using its extensive network of retailers and last mile connectivity, Pay1 can bring down the cost of operations, the efficiency of doing business and cost of customer acquisitions.

Pay 1 is an innovative business based on inclusion especially of the underserviced retail businesses in mofussil India.

Pay1 has impacted 200K+ retailers across 250+ cities in 28 states in the last seven years.