Mobile wallets make their presence felt on the first day of GOSF 2014

The third edition of the three-days shopping festival GOSF has kicked off today by featuring deals and discounts from more than 400 online merchant partners. One of the new things this year is the arrival of mobile wallets in the scene, battling out its way in paper money’s stranglehold economy.

It has been about four years since RBI’s regulations allowed mobile wallets to operate. At present, mobile wallets are just scratching the surface and quite far from mass adoption. Based on the interactions we had with the mobile wallet startups, GOSF has been a good exposure platform for mobile wallets like MobiKwik, Paytm, Zipcash and Oxigyn wallet.

A research firm RNCOS estimates that the current Indian m-wallet market size at about Rs. 350 crore, projected to grow at a CAGR of around 30 % in the next five years. By 2019, the segment is estimated to reach Rs. 1,210 crore market sizes.

For mobile wallets, online shopping is one of the value added service they can offer there users. Thirty eight per cent of the mobile wallet activity is on money transfers, 30% is for bill payment, and utility 12%. Shopping is still a very small portion among other 20% of activities. In just six hours of GOSF going live today, we heard 15,000 e-commerce transactions took place via Wallet.

Upasana Taku, Co-founder of MobiKwik, was thrilled at the feverish pitch with which MobiKwik users were using their MobiKwik Wallet to shop during GOSF. She said, “The fact that MobiKwik is now established as one of the top apps in India motivates us to consistently set higher benchmarks in the mobile wallet space. The MobiKwik app has consistently been rated as a best-in-class, clutter-breaking product thanks to its small size and stellar speed." The MobiKwik Android app has also crossed the 5M million downloads milestone.

As we’ve heard, MobiKwik has seen significant traffic due to GOSF today and reports 60,000 additional Wallet deposits and 200,000 "Wallet Purchases". MobiKwik is giving users 20% cashback on top of all GOSF discounts on e-commerce websites such as Snapdeal, eBay, Shopclues, HomeShop18, Naaptol, Infibeam, Dominos, MakeMyTrip, BookMyShow, Purplle, Pepperfry, AmericanSwan, and FashionAndYou, etc.

In the mean time, Paytm has reported its Wallet traffic has spiked by 5x at the beginning of the GOSF day. Most of Paytm’s users had frequented BookMyShow and ShopClue.

MobiKwik has witnessed its highest transaction on ShopClues, eBay and SnapDeal.

Another e-commerce site, ShopeClues, which claims a 200% surge in traffic, reported 30% of its traffic has come from first time visitors. The statement said, “This year heightened mobile transactions have also been witnessed.”

Last year, two million users had visited GOSF sites and the merchants registered twice the growth on their daily average sales, this year it is expecting three times the sales. We’ll be reporting on that soon.

This is a light at the end of tunnel for India’s m-commerce that was punching below its weight. There is a huge mobile-based transaction potential in India; we are just scratching the surface. Looking at the first day of activity of mobile wallets at the shopping festival makes the ecosystem even more hopeful for better days ahead.

India has mobile based wallets offered by multiple players, including Airtel Money, Vodafone m-Pesa, Oxigen, Paytm, Mobikwik, Reliance’s Jio Money, Idea Money and Tata’s mRuppe.