With the upcoming festive season, the e-commerce platforms are gearing up for various mediums to attract customers through methods like festive season sale and offers. With this, the e-commerce player Flipkart has come up with a fresh feature that is a credit line for customers to complete their shopping on the platform.
This credit line is known as ‘Cardless Credit’ which will allow the customers to get an instant credit line of up to Rs 60,000 based on the user’s creditworthiness. The customers who do not have a formal credit access, through this feature, can purchase products and in turn trigger a growth in the gross merchandise value for the e-commerce major Flipkart.
“Close to 45 million customers on our platform do not have formal access to credit and a good portion of this is emerging from tier II, III towns,” said Ravi Garikipati, senior vice president and head of Flipkart. “Cardless Credit is a step in the direction to make e-commerce more inclusive and help customers with small ticket credit line while they make a purchase at Flipkart.”
Prior to this also, Flipkart had rolled out a range of affordability instruments including no cost EMI, debit card EMIs, product exchange offers, buy-back guarantees and buy now pay later to make products affordable and easier to purchase and make payments.
At present, talking about the details, only 3% of stock keeping units of Flipkart are purchased through the pay later option, however, it is expected to increase soon. “We would like to drive our GMV by 15-20% in the next 24 months using our affordability instruments,” said Garikipati.
Cardless Credit works on the user transacting data on the platform and also sources data from other places and built its own underwriting platform. The credit line is currently available to be used only on Flipkart, but the company plans to give external existence to the offering in the future.