Hyderabad-based NumberMall gives consumers cashback while increasing walk-in for local retailers

“Indian local commerce is catching fast as you see many of the local retailers have already started selling their goods and services through marketplaces. This is going to be the next big thing. Local retailers are seeing great value in Internet mobile commerce for them to sell online,” says Kiran Kumar Gali, the founder of NumberMall.

NumberMall was bootstrapped in 2012 and is growing 300% year on year having 12,500 retailer networks across Andhra and Telangana states. Though the team had a cash & equity acquisition offer recently valuing the company at 120 crore, they thought it is too early to exit as the business has large room to grow. The founder says, “We have decided to raise new funds for expanding into new markets in India.”

In 2012-13, NumberMall had 37 crore turnover and in 2013-14, 117 cores. Their projection for the year 2014-15 is to touch 250 crore. The team started with four people and now they have 30 employees, over 200 distributors and 1.2 lakhs retail partners on-board. Their business model is capturing a commission per transaction. Though NumberMall didn’t share their exact profit numbers with YourStory, they’ve disclosed that they pocket close to <1% of their turnover.

NumberMall is a B2B and B2C play. The startup is engaged in the business of providing mobile phone based online citizen services on a single platform such as mobile recharges, DTH recharges, data card recharges, post paid bill payments and bus tickets. They claim they are India’s first merchant managed local coupon platform for offering local merchant discount coupons with a promise to deliver the customers a great rewarding experience for their spending on recharges, payments and tickets.

Giving consumers a cashback

Kiran describes their core offering saying “if a customer spends Rs.100 for their mobile recharge on NumberMall, he/she can get Rs.100 worth of discount coupon which they can redeem by making purchases from the local businesses which issue them.” Users use various services of NumberMall on a daily basis and get back what they spent in the form of discount coupons, which can be redeemed at the respective local businesses which issues them. NumberMall serves millions of users on a monthly basis with various service offerings in recharges, tickets and payments and has deep rooted network in local markets.

Increasing walk-ins for retailers

Kiran explains the crowd-pulling nature of his business, and says, “NumberMall helps the retailers or merchants to increase their core business by way of offering their discount coupons to the customers who walk-in for their recharges, bill payment or ticketing needs and they ask customer to redeem the coupon within the due date to get the coupon advantage, in this process retailer gets more business, which means more profit.”

For retailers, NumberMall is a unified ERP platform that aggregates all services in one dashboard. It helps them to be part of the lucrative and profitable service sectors of telecom, entertainment, travel, insurance, financial services, and utility without complicated process and upfront/overhead cost.

Kiran has a word for new entrepreneurs, “The role of addressing the problems with great solutions is part of entrepreneurship, so never quit because of problems, fix it with great solution. Think big.”