Paytm, which has recently forayed into online retailing business, is planning to bring in 1,00,000 sellers from Chinese e-tailer Alibaba's online arm AliExpress to its platform from August.
The Delhi-based company estimates its gross merchandise value (GMV) to increase by $1.5 billion from AliExpress businesses in the next six months.
Paytm, originally a mobile payment services, has crossed $1.5 billion (about ₹9,600 crore) in GMV in the year ending April 2015.
"According to our initial estimates, we'll be able to double our gross merchandise within six months with the help of AliExpress integration," Amit Lakhotia, vice president-payments at Paytm, told The Economic Times.
The latest move by Patym is part of its major stakeholder Alibaba's strategy to expand its business outside China. Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has 25 percent stake worth $650 million (about ₹4,160 crore) in One97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm.
Alibaba aims to garner a pie of lucrative $6 billion (₹38,400 crore) e-commerce market in India.
Swiss bank UBS expects the online retailing market to grow 10 times to a maximum of $60 billion by 2020, based on internet penetration, per capita gross domesict product (GDP) and total retail market size of the country, according to NDTV Profit.
"We are undergoing quite a complex integration with AliExpress, something we haven't done in the past," Lakhotia said.
"We are looking at various aspects such as legal and taxation issues, international logistics, customs, the process for issuing payouts to merchants and for refunds," he added.
Customers will have a choice to pay cash on delivery on all the orders they place on Chinese goods, Lakhotia said.
"From a customer perspective, there'll be no difference between an Indian and a Chinese merchant. We'll be the one responsible for the logistics and customer care," he said.
The company has to expand its infrastructure quickly in order to allow 1,00,000 Chinese sellers to its platform. Currently, Paytm has 40,000 sellers on its platform with just 10,000 seeing business on a monthly basis.
With a valuation of $1.83 billion, Paytm is among the most valued startups in the Indian e-commerce space, next to online retailers Flipkart and Snapdeal and cab aggregator OlaCabs, Livemint reported.
The company expects its secure platform and the range of options will enable it to take on Snapdeal and Flipkart.
