Paytm run by One97 Communication has accused Snapdeal owned Unicommerce for having accessed confidential business data on Paytm’s commerce platform. Unicommerce, an online multi channel order fulfillment platform that was founded in 2012 and helps e-commerce merchants to sell efficiently.
This incident does ring a bell as it comes right after the legal battle between two largest cab-hailing services in India – Uber and Ola. Paytm and Unicommerce seem to have fallen in a similar soup, Alibaba backed Paytm has also reportedly filed a lawsuit against Unicommerce accusing the latter of using Paytm’s logo and name without authorization.
Unicommerce was founded in 2012 by Ankit Pruthi, Vibhu Garg, Karun Singla and Manish Gupta and had raised undisclosed amount of funding from Nexus Venture Partners in 2013. Later it also raised $10 million from Tiger Global Management in 2014. In 2015, Snapdeal acquired Unicommerce for undisclosed amount.
A lot many sellers on Paytm are using Unicommerce to ease on a lot of work like managing orders and inventory across multiple marketplaces. This gets dangerous for Paytm as this data could be well used for creating a strategy against them, due to which they’re fretting and have filed a legal suit.
“Data is of utmost importance as it provides valuable insights on consumer behaviour. Company-specific data getting into the hands of rivals can impact the business negatively,” said a legal expert tracking startups in India.
Paytm is backed by Alibaba, and it has large payment service in China with many international vendor relationships. Paytm in turn gets to do business with those and has a huge plus in its booty. Hence as Alipay becomes one of the largest marketplace globally, Paytm has a mark made back in India.
The fact that Snapdeal and Paytm are at loggerheads ever since the former entered payment segment when it acquired Freecharge. Paytm on the other hand is the largest mobile commerce platform in India. In a similar instance, Uber had accused Ola alleging it had created fake accounts and filed a petition against Ola.
Paytm, Snapdeal and Unicommerce have declined to comment saying the matter is sub judice. The hearing is expected to take place on Thursday.
These legal battles show some grave tensions in the Internet industries, which have boomed up due to the increased competitions, big investors and large market numbers.
Well sellers can use whatever we like, if we dont like Paytm panel then we will not use it, there are many like me i know and unicommerce is making life easy for us.
Hahhaha, I posted same hypothesis just three weeks back when paytm was sending hate mails to sellers for using Unicommerce
http://www.sugamja.in/itne-khafa-khafa-kyun-ho-unicommerce-snapdeal-to-paytm-airing-dirty-laundry-in-public-the-rise-fall-of-unicommerce/
platforms like unicommerce should remain to third party owners only so that these problems won’t occur. BTW unicommerce is an awesome platform for sellers with multiple ecommerce sites. Lets see who will win this battle