Flipkart acquires F1 Info solutions

India’s leading e-commerce marketplace Flipkart has acquired mobile repair chain F1 Info Solutions as it looks to improve its after sales service offerings to customers on its platform.

Smartphones account for over 50 per cent of the sales (by value) on Flipkart, making it the most important category for the Indian e-tailer. With F1 Info Solutions, the company will gain access to its own chain of service centres across the country. F1 Info Solutions will become a part of Jeeves, a firm that Flipkart invested in 2014. Jeeves specializes in providing after-sales service for large and small home appliances and furniture.

Following the acquisition, Flipkart will be able to monetize its customers across the lifecycle of a product, rather than just at the time of sale. According to the company, F1 Info Solutions has 158 centres and these are located in 135 cities across the country. The firm currently employs around 1,000 people who handle around 50,000 service calls every month. F1 Info is also a certified partner for several global consumer technology majors such as Apple, Samsung, HP, Lenovo, Sony and Asus.

The development comes at a time when the ecommerce giant is gearing up to sell refurbished smartphones ahead of Diwali. According to sources, Flipkart-certified refurbished smartphones will soon be sold on the online marketplace and offline outlets. To that end, the company is looking to team up with distributors for offline sale, as part of a move aimed at lowering high return rates of handsets.

Quikr Buys Indian Realty Exchange

Online classifieds portal Quikr India Pvt. Ltd had acquired Indian Realty Exchange (IRX, incorporated as 123 Startup Ventures Pvt. Ltd) a real estate agent aggregator, for an undisclosed amount to strengthen its real estate vertical QuikrHomes.

With its latest round of funding ($60 Million) in September, Quikr strengthened its push in five business segments automobiles, real estate, jobs, services and customer-to-customer sales to explore new sources of revenue. These five categories account for about 90% of the 10 Million listings of platform. This acquisition will allow it to gain access to real estate agents.

QuikrHomes currently has customers in 1000 cities and towns across India and concludes 200,000 transactions per month. IRX helps users connect to the agents for buying and selling property, and updates listings with locations in real time and features agent reviews, rankings, trust networks and a chat platform for agents to exchange inventory and requirements with users and other agents.

Quikr has received funding of around $200 Million since its inception in 2008, and counts Tiger Global Management, Kinnevik, Matrix Partners India, Nokia Growth Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, Warburg Pincus, and eBay as its investors. QuikrHomes enters into competition with CommonFloor, Housing.com, PropTiger, NoBroker, and Magic Bricks. 

PayPal bought Money Transfer service Xoom

PayPal has made a few significant acquisitions since 2013, including purchasing Paydiant and Braintree. Now, PayPal said it would buy digital money transfer provider Xoom Corp. for $890 Million as it muscles into a growing international remittance market and expand in countries like Mexico, India and China ahead of a spinoff from eBay Inc.

Xoom, which has 1.3 Million customers and a presence in 37 countries, allow users to transfer money via desktop, mobile phones and tablets. The acquisition would allow Xoom to expand into new markets with less execution risk. Xoom will operate as a separate service within PayPal after the completion of the deal.

PayPal faces increasing competition from rivals like Stripe and Square, which is popular with smaller businesses and Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay. Online commerce foe Amazon Inc. is also beginning to explore in store payments. The company is slated to separate from eBay this month and list as an Independent company.

PayPal has been pushing hard into mobile, where customers are more frequently making everyday purchases. The company has touted its peer-to-peer money transferring division Venmo, used primarily by smartphone touting millennial, and earlier this year bought app developer Paydiant.

PayPal buys Mobile Payment startup Paydiant

PayPal is an American international Digital wallet based e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders. PayPal is one of the world’s largest internet payment companies. The company operates as an acquirer, performing payment processing for online vendors, auction sites and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee.

The eBay payment unit plans to acquire Paydiant, a payments startup that licenses a technology platform used by big retail chains to create their own branded mobile wallet apps. PayPal will pay around $280 Million for the startup. Founded in 2010, Paydiant white label platform is used by Subway and other retailers and banks to add payment, loyalty, and digital coupon capabilities to their own apps. Its customer list also includes MCX, a consortium of big box retailers led by Walmart that says it will launch its mobile wallet app this year.

Competition in the mobile wallet sector is heating up with the launch of Apple Pay, Samsung offering Samsung Pay beginning this summer and Google teaming up with Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile to have its Google Wallet payment service built into Android phones sold by those carriers. EBay has been planning to spin off its PayPal payment business in the second half of this year.

In 2013, PayPal had acquired mobile payment service Venmo. PayPal has also announced that its Here card reader for mobile payments will soon support the wireless payment technology. The NFC enabled version of Here will pair with phones via Bluetooth, and supports traditional chip and PIN methods. The new NFC enabled PayPal Here Chip and PIN card reader, which will start rolling out in the UK and Australia this summer, and in the US later this year.