With acquisition of Zopper, PhonePe ramps up its O2O play 

Online payment solution PhonePe has acquired a Tiger Global-backed Zopper Retail, a customer-focused point of sale (PoS) system for retailers and small and medium businesses.

The acquisition by Flipkart-owned payment platform is targeted to strengthen its merchant ecosystem. Zopper offers a complete software solution including GST, billing, CRM, and payments to retailers.

Meanwhile, the acquisition doesn’t include Zopper Assure platform that runs e-warranty programme for electronics, mobile phones, and appliances.

For PhonePe, the acquisition is crucial as the platform is focussing on offline to online (O2O) segment, and launched an ingeniously designed Point Of Sale (PoS) device powered by Bluetooth technology for Kirana stores, petrol pumps, food chains, and others.

Since PhonePe has been ramping up its merchant ecosystem to maintain a lead against rivals, Zopper Retail would help it further to penetrate deeper into offline retail. PhonePe claimed over 70 per cent market share in overall merchant UPI transactions.

Currently, PhonePe claims to have over 3 lakh merchant base.

At present, Paytm is ahead than PhonePe in terms of volume. While Paytm had claimed $29 billion GTV in May through wallets, UPI, and bank transfers, PhonePe announced that it had crossed $20 billion annualised total payments volume (TPV) during the same month.

To make a frequent use case for users, PhonePe recently integrated Ola, Redbus, and Goibibo on its app. For accelerating growth of its subsidiary, Flipkart had also invested about Rs 518 crore into the payment business in October last year.

The development was first reported by ET.