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Global mobility solutions provider Mahindra Comviva has forayed into the B2C space, with the launch of Zerch, a hyper-local deals discovery app for Android and iOS users in Bengaluru and Delhi/NCR.
Zerch has already crossed 150,000 active users and has exclusive offers listed across 2,800 merchants that it has partnered with. Currently, 750 merchants in Bengaluru and 1,350 in Delhi/NCR offer Zerch-exclusive deals.
“While there are online players like Groupon and CouponDunia offering deals to consumers, we found that there is no one offering brick-n-mortar merchants a location and context based discovery platform for deals and offers that they can push to consumers. Zerch is targetting merchants in the Food & Beverages, Apparel Retail and Wellness & Fitness categories in the top 10-12 cities in the country, which together constitute a $100-billion market,” Srinivas Nidugondi, Senior Vice-President and Head of Mobile Financial Solutions, Mahindra Comviva told BusinessLine .
Over the next 6-9 months, focus will be on customer acquisition and ensuring usage, as well as providing value proposition to merchants, after which we will look to monetise the app, added Nidugondi. A customer who has downloaded the Zerch app will receive a notification on special deals on offer when he enters one of the Zerch merchant partner stores. For every deal that is redeemed in-store, Mahindra Comviva will receive a percentage of the transaction as fee.
“Very soon we will start deal discovery outside the stores, where customers will discover deals and order while they are at home” said Nidugondi.
The company is looking to garner 2 million customers and 10,000 merchants by December 2016 and will also move from hyper-local deal offers to micro-local, contextual deal offers in three months.
In micro-local, deals specific to an individual customer’s preferences and buying behaviour will be offered through Zerch.
“A recently concluded promotional activity with 15 select merchants in Bengaluru showed an increase in footfall of around 5-10 per cent for most stores on a day-to-day basis. The plan is to take contextual marketing messaging in stores to the next level by leveraging the O2O (online to offline) wave of the internet and enabling them to become smart stores” said Nidugondi.
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