<div>In a slowing economy with rising inflation, retail therapy can be healing, especially if you get some cash back on every purchase. Launched in India in November 2011, Pennyful.in helps both the customers and the e-commerce portals by directing the customers to the retailers' sites and helping them avail a cashback offer, over and above the ongoing discounts and coupon deals.<strong> Ravitej Yadalam</strong>, a 25-year old graduate from the R.V. College of Engineering in Bangalore, started Pennyful fresh out of college. Yadalam spoke to BW Online's <strong>Tanuja Chatterjee</strong> about Pennyful, its acceptance in the Indian market and other aspects of its functioning.</div><div> </div><div><strong>What is Pennyful.in all about? How does it function?</strong></div><div>Pennyful is a company incorporated in the year March’2010. We are into three separate lines of business. We started off with Pennyful.com that is a cashback coupon website for the US market, launched in January’ 2011. </div><div> </div><div>It is a simple concept. We have a cashback offer through Pennyful. Basically what that means is wetie up with various ecommerce companies in India for example if I take Pennyful.in , we tied up with say Yatra.com. So instead of directly going to Yatra.com, the users will turn back to Pennyful, and then we will redirect it to Yatra.com, where the user will still pay Yatra.com and get the tickets or whatsoever. So we will not be involved in those processes. All we will do is we redirect the users to Yatra website.</div><div> </div><div>There are two things that Pennyful offers i.e. the above mentioned cashbach offer and the coupon codes. The cashback is the money that we pay you on top of every other deal and discount. So let’s say Yebhi is offering a fifty per cent off on a shoes section, so you will still get the fifty per cent off on the final price that you pay because you went through Pennyful, and then we will pay you part of the money as cashback.</div><div> </div><div>We also have a bunch of coupon codes that offer instant discounts. So for instance, Yebhi might have Pennyful enlisted on their site. So when you go through Pennyful and reach Yebhi.com, at the checkout, the user will need to enter the coupon code that will fetch him instant discount. And automatically the cashback will be credited to his Pennyful account.</div><div> </div><div><strong>How was the feedback of users in US?</strong></div><div>Today we work with 1,500 different e-commerce companies as much in partners. We showcase around 42 major products from the platform. So it’s been around 2 years now since Pennyful has been live. In India we launched in November’ 2011. It’s been just over a year and the feedback has been amazing.</div><div> </div><div><strong>How did you come up with this concept? Before Pennyful, were you working with something in the same lines?</strong></div><div>While I was in college, I was experimenting with e-commerce sometime before the company was started. So I came across this whole industry of Philip marketing, which essentially is when we are allowed to market the products of another company or brand in exchange for generating actual sales and revenue for them. Thus, I started my first venture of Pennyful.com right after college.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Can a user directly use your coupon by logging in the concerned shopping portal, or it always have to be through your channel?</strong></div><div>That is the single requirement that we have that the shoppers always has to go through our channel to avail the cashback money in their Pennyful account. Eventually the reason behind this is that our engagement with the ecommerce sites is such that we refer customers to them and in exchange to the referral we get a cut of whatever spend happens on the concerned portal, and that part we share with our associated consumers as a cashback rebate.</div><div> </div><div>Though sign up is not a requirement to browse the offers on Pennyful.com, but before the user actually reach the concerned portal, he will need to sign up and create an account on Pennyful. Mainly the reason is that once the consumer transacts with the shopping portal, then the cashback that they will earn will be credited to their Pennyful account that eventually acts as a virtual piggy bank for all cashback that they earn across all 100 plus partners of ours. So weather they shop from Yatra.com or a Fipkart or a Myntra and so on, the user will get a cashback into a common Pennyful account of the consumer.</div><div> </div><div><strong>What kind of revenue model do you follow? This more or less seems to be affiliate marketing. So how do you derive revenue?</strong></div><div>Under affiliate marketing, there are three more models in the industry today. The first type of model is the ‘cost-per-click’ model where the merchant for instance Yebhi.com will engage publishers like Pennyful.in and say we pay them on every click of the ad that happens.</div><div> </div><div>The second type is known as ‘cost-per-lead’ that means Yebhi will pay the publisher for every sign up that happens and lastly the ‘cost-per-sale’ which is actually what Pennyful follows, i.e. we will not charge our partner shopping portals on any clicks or traffic submissions or even for sign-ups. We only charge them for an actual transaction that takes place.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Don’t you think the time frame of 1-7 days of fetching cashback in the account is a bit too much! I mean, the customer has to keep a track of the transaction and check the cash details regularly for a week!</strong></div><div>Basically it is a twenty four hours frame that happens, but for legal reasons we have maximized the time frame to 7 days. Sometimes, the consumer may receive the order confirmation to say that the transaction has been tracked on the next day of the purchase.</div><div> </div><div><strong>If a consumer purchases a product from a portal, and doesn’t like it and returns it back after 7 days, will you take back the respective cash gained from the concerned transaction from the customer’s account?</strong></div><div>The cashback is posted within 1-7 days into the concerned customer's Pennyful account with a status 'Pending'. There is a 30 day or slightly more (depending on the shopping portal) period which accounts for the return period. If a consumer got a product and decided to return it back after 20 days. This 1-7 day frame commences from the day when the return period is over. So once the return period is over, and the merchant informs us, then we make it available and this time the status changes accordingly.</div><div> </div><div><strong>“Pennyful is not liable to pay any cashback if the order is not tracked/recorded for any reason” Don’t you think the customer may have to suffer due to this?</strong></div><div>Again here the reason is the legal standpoint. If the customer directly visits some merchant’s website and further claims for the cashback, of course then Pennyful hasn’t received its cut and the whole flow haven’t been followed. We have visually 2 or 3 such incidents happening. It is just a preventive measure.</div><div> </div><div>Cases that we have actually gone through, is that every time when a click happens on Pennyful towards a website that is also tracked by us. We never had a situation where a customer has come to our site, clicked through and not got the cashback. At least, Pennyful is sure that when customers click through our website, we surely carry out the commitment for what we are known.</div><div> </div><div><strong>How do you address the consumer grievances?</strong></div><div>As I said, we have control of the consumer actions from the point they log into their Pennyful account until they reach the merchant’s website. So anything related to the product that they have actually bought, any payments that may have taken place will still be taken care of by the merchant’s website.</div><div> </div><div>For Pennyful, we have our customer care team set up to cater to such issues. We have email support and call support as well. We did start live chat sometime back which we are trying to bring back as soon as possible.</div><div> </div><div><strong>What happened to the live chat aspect?</strong></div><div>Actually we are going through the website renovation process. If you look at Pennyful.com which is the US website, basically we are trying to remodel India into that kind of website. These two are completely two different types of websites. So that’s the reason that some of the features are on halt for now.</div><div> </div><div><strong>What made you wait for so long to enter the Indian market?</strong></div><div>When I started the company, online shopping scenario was absolutely new in India. There were not many investors; there were not many companies to begin with. So the market was really not that large. And even if you look at it today, Indian ecommerce market is growing at 30-35 per cent year on year which is really incredible. So we decided to start in India because of the fast paced growth that Indian e-commerce market was experiencing. So that is the reason we did take a call at 2012.</div><div> </div><div>But if you look at absolute numbers, it is still much smaller than other markets. In the US, in 2012 the consumer would have nearly spent $1,200 for online shopping. In India, if you see comparative values, it is just likely to be Rs 1,000 only, that is approx. $200. So in the absolute value of the spend that is made is substantially less in India. But having said that, if you look at it in terms of the pattern, the consumer is actually shopping more in terms of frequency, which is much more comparable metric. So for example in the US an avid consumer of Pennyful would transact between 6-7 times, and in India we are seeing very similar number (around 6 times).</div><div> </div><div>That is also interesting to say that even though it is very new culture, somebody who is comfortable with shopping online matches frequency of being our consumer.</div><div> </div><div><strong>What are you doing on the advertising front for Pennyful?</strong></div><div>We have seen excellent results in terms of referrals. So we have refferal programme on Pennyful where the consumers earn bonus cashback for reffering their friend. So what we have actually noticed is that for every 100th user of Pennyful that has been reffered by their friend, 72 per cent of them have shopped at least once which is quite a high percentage. So that is something on which we have been capitalising on and it’s just today that we have launched a campaign for the referral section on Pennyful .in where the consumer just needs to give a miss call on the mentioned number that will fetch him a unique number through call or message on their contact number. So this call or message would be registered into their Pennyful account. For every 5 friends that the customer refer , it will fetch Rs 100 to the customer’s Pennyful account.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Your future plans...</strong></div><div>The reason why Pennyful exists is to empower the consumer and make her every penny count while shopping online. To that end we actually launched a programme called Medicash.in in February this year. It is India’s first and only free health care programme. We try to apply our expertise in online rewards and cashbacks and further apply it to the offline healthcare space. So we are now also able to offer cashbacks and discounts to consumers on how they spend in an offline scenario with respect to healthcare for families, corporate hospitals or diagnostic centers etc.</div>
