Zaggle acquires Pennyful

Hyderabad-based Zaggle Prepaid Ocean Services Pvt. Ltd, which operates digital payments and cashback company Zaggle, has bought online coupons firm Pennyful in a cash and stock deal. The acquisition will help Zaggle offer benefits to consumers and corporate employees, and develop technology products and solutions.

Zaggle is moving towards an omni-channel marketing platform following the acquisition of Pennyful. Zaggle, over a period of five years, has built a huge repertoire of business-to-business clients. The focus is on the business-to-business-to-consumer market of over 25 million [customers], and we want to create more and more value for this set of consumers.

Bengaluru-based Pennyful Online Pvt. Ltd was founded in 2011 in the US. The firm entered the Indian market in November 2012. The cashback and coupons company has 1,000 brands and claims to have customers from more than 800 cities. Zaggle was founded in 2011 and currently has six offices across India with over 1,000 corporate clients and over 1,500 merchants on board.

Other players in the deals segment include Nearbuy, mydala, CouponDunia and CashKaro, among others. Last month, online deals startup Couponhaat raised pre-Series A investment from Austria-based angel investor Axel Wawrina. In November 2016, rewards app Kloseby, which helps users earn rewards when visiting stores, raised $100,000 (around Rs 68 lakh) in seed investment.

Yahoo to acquire Polyvore

Yahoo Chief executive officer Marissa Mayer is pushing to add more news, entertainment and shopping information to the web portal in order to draw a bigger audience and sell advertising. Yahoo Inc. is buying shopping service Polyvore Inc., seeking to improve its online fashion content and boost shopping related advertising.

Polyvore, which combines social and e-commerce, tools for apparel and accessories, will initially be integrated into Yahoo’s Magazines that focus on beauty and style. Polyvore lets users put together themed collections of items, like those seen in fashion magazines. People can browse through the collections and then buy the items. Polyvore will add more than 350 retailers to Yahoo’s advertising platform.

Polyvore backers include Goldman Sachs, DAG Ventures, and Benchmark Capital. The company had raised $22 Million. Earlier this year, Yahoo unveiled new financial metric tracking revenue in its four key areas of growth: mobile, video, native, and social, or MaVeNS. The idea was to focus investors’ attention on the areas of the company that are growing while diverting their focus from its shrinking desktop display and search ads.

Askme acquires BestAtLowest.com

Askme.com, the online search, listings and deals portal of Getit Infomedia Pvt. Ltd, has acquired Online groceries start up BestAtLowest.com. With this acquisition, the e-commerce portal and its team of 25 people became a part of Askme. This will work on integrating BestAtLowest.com into askmegroceries.com which will be launched later this year.

Accelity BestAtLowest.com Online services Pvt. Ltd, which runs bestatlowest.com is a marketplace working in the hub and spoke model. It has tied up with retailers and supermarket stores to acquire food and groceries to supply to its hub, which are the delivered across locations. It offers a same day delivery service within 4-6 hours of consumers placing an order in Delhi and the National Capital Region.

This is an acqui-hire, where one acquire a company and get its talent on board to extend or build a new category. In March, Godrej Nature Basket had acquired Ekstop.com, an online groceries portal, and integrated its platform to augment its online delivery and web presence. The brand also offers same day delivery in the five cities it operates.

Online groceries which is not even a per cent of sales of the consumer packaged goods sector, is becoming a fast growing segment. The internet will influence one-third of the total sales in the consumer packaged goods sector in the next five years. Brick and mortar retail in India is expected to grow three times to $180 Billion in 2020 from $60 Billion in 2015. 

Snapdeal acquires FreeCharge

India’s largest online marketplace, Snapdeal has acquired FreeCharge, India’s fastest growing mobile transaction platform. This is one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of Internet industry in India and sets up Snapdeal to build the most impactful digital commerce ecosystem in India.

With this acquisition, Snapdeal becomes the largest mobile commerce company in India offering the widest range of products and services, including financial services, mobile recharge and utility payments with an exponentially growing user base of over 40 Million. FreeCharge is India’s leading mobile ecommerce platform where users can pay their mobile DTH and utility payments across most major operators.

Every day 75 Million mobile recharges are done in India by a section of India’s 800 Million mobile phone subscribers. FreeCharge offers a convenient and efficient solution applicable to hundreds of millions of consumers for paying utility bills, and especially doing mobile recharges, which often ends up being the first e-commerce transaction that a consumer does online given the ticket size and instant gratification.

FreeCharge will continue to function as an independent platform and all aspects of FreeCharge Shopping experience will remain intact. The companies will collaborate to offer a seamless shopping experience to customers across both the platforms offering an even wider range of products and services. Over the past six months, Snapdeal has acquired Exclusively.in, Doozton, and Wishpicker. Snapdeal also picked up a majority stake in digital financial services platform RupeePower.com.