Chaitanya Athukuri’s Post

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Product @Nielsen | Writings For The Top 1% Growth Seekers In Business | Building Data Products (Not AI / AGI)

The Cashback Strategy is Not Gonna Work Anymore! Here's why Remember the excitement surrounding GPay's launch and its cashback scratch cards? Feels like forever ago seeing the cashback, right? Back in 2017, the UPI market share looked like this: BHIM - 52%, PhonePe - 16%, Google Pay - 12%, Paytm - 4% Within a year, by 2018, here's how the market share changed: GPay - 39%, BHIM - 34%, PhonePe - 14%, Paytm - 6% It's all the transformation that happened because of the referral strategy and cashback offers; they played a significant role in GPay's user base growth in 2018. Referral incentives likely attracted new users, and cashbacks encouraged existing ones to make repeat transactions. So, the change in 2018. Now, CRED enters the market with the same strategy of cashback, coupons, and great ad concepts that are everywhere. Three and a half years later, this is the state today: PhonePe - 50%, GPay - 35%, Paytm - 9%, Cred - 1%, Others - 5% The reasons for Cred to be at that state of a bare 1%, even after providing great cashback, are multiple. Here are a few: ▶ Cred is only for users with more than 750 credit scores (top 5% of the Indian audience). ▶ Cred's UI is pretty complicated for regular users. ▶ Most of their users belong to India-1; they care about product efficiency, not cashback. If these are the reasons for Cred, here are the other reasons why cashback doesn't work anymore: ▶ Users value transaction success rate more than cashback. Users need the UPI which even works at very low signals; PhonePe is the name I hear often that it even works on 2G. ▶ It's hard to teach a new UI to India-2&3. Once they get used to the product, they don't like to change often because of trust issues. ▶ Indian 2&3 don't know much about coupons as they don't know these new brands, which is the major percentage in the market share. So, with all these points, isn't the Indian UPI market looking saturated? With these observations, do you think Jupiter has any scope of entering and making an impact on the market share? I don't think so. I will soon share a detailed analysis of why it's hard for Jupiter or any new platform to create a change in the UPI market. Liked the above read? Follow Chaitanya Athukuri for valuable insights in business and product management. #marketshare #referralstrategy #cashback #Cred #PhonePe #Paytm #credit score #UI #transaction #India #coupons #Jupiter #marketanalysis

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Mayank Agarwal

Director @PocketFM | Mentoring passionate folks 🚀| Ex-BCG, IIMB & IITR grad

7mo

Jupiter has way more chance..than CRED :) Jupiter UI is much fascinating :) It's other features is way more better..like invest every time you pay.. The overall eco system JUPITER has created is really appreciated.

Interesting insights on the evolution of cashback strategies in the UPI market!

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