Monthly Archives: April 2017

Unanswered questions on Paytm’s digital gold?

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Digital Gold by Paytm

Been hearing a lot of advertisements on Paytm Digital Gold on radio in the last few days, possibly because of Akshay Tritiya. I decided to look at their scheme, more closely at their terms and conditions and there seem to be a couple very important questions which need to be addressed.

Question 1. Since a customer can buy digital gold which they can at any time redeem into real gold and have it delivered to them, what is the kind of ratios Paytm / MMTC would be maintaining for this.

E.g, If I buy 1 gram of digital gold, would Paytm instruct MMTC to keep 1 gram of real gold under my account in their vault or would they be keeping just a fraction? Now let’s assume 10,000 people buy 100 KG of digital gold collectively. Would MMTC be keeping 100 KG as deposit or would be be keeping just a % of the deposit.

This question is important because Gold is not an infinite resource, even government and banks long back moved to Fiat currency because they could no longer be able to keep the equivalent stock in gold. This questions becomes even more important when there is an emergency and people want to keep their assets close to them and all of a sudden a lot of people want to convert their digital gold into real gold… would Paytm / MMTC be able to supply the gold on time if at all?

Question 2: The second biggest question would be that if Paytm / MMTC are just keeping a fraction of your digital gold investment in real gold then what are they doing with the remaining money? Is it kept safe in an escrow account or do they have the permission to use it however they like.. e.g advertising a whole lot more to get even more digital gold customers?

Both the above questions are extremely important as this ensures or does not ensure the safety of your investment. Before you invest in such schemes, I would encourage you to read Paytm’s policy and other details.

Problems with Indian ecommerce marketplaces, especially Flipkart

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If you have read my previous posts, you will know that I had initially signed up with Amazon.in to sell the Satthwa products but unfortunately after endless paperwork and nonsensical rules which Amazon follows (Only in India), I had to give up selling on Amazon.

Then I started selling on Flipkart and till a few days the experience had been good. Satthwa is a Silver level seller on Flipkart which means that we go good business, our returns are next to nothing, our products are loved by those who buy and we ship out almost the same day of the order. Our Metrics is topnotch.

So where is the problem? The problem arises when Flipkart does not think of the sellers as their “customers”. Technically in a marketplace model, we the sellers, sell to the end user and they are our customers. For market places which as Flipkart and Amazon, we the sellers are their customers. If this is the case then the same rules should apply to both set of customers, right? No! They don’t.

Let me elaborate. If a end user who just bought something from Flipkart calls their customer support, their query is handles on priority, customers can even cancel a product on the day it is to be delivered without any cost to them. Where as for a seller, Flipkart take their own sweet time to resolve a query.. if at all they manage to do that. Most of the time, they mark the tickers as resolved after a few days and the seller keeps waiting for the reply.

Today because of some “technical issue” (which is a fancy word for an idiot sitting in front of a computer) one of my listings was blocked and i have been on call since the morning.. whenever i requested to talk to a senior person, i was told they are not available…

My account has been assigned a account manager but what’s the point when the account manager phone always goes unanswered?

Sellers are the backbone for such online marketplaces and we also want to be treated with the same respect as would any customer.