A Journey from Offline to Online Transactions
MP Pariksha app was on Play Store. We had our content ready. The next step was to define a transaction journey for a user, in case we had users flowing in.
👉 Our initial users were mostly rural and semi-urban people. We decided to go back in time with them and bring out the scratch card feel again. The plan was to have our “Safalta Cards” at every book store/coaching center/stores that are the go-to places across MP. A user could buy it from these places and get a scratch code through which he/she could unlock the test series.
👉 The advantage was they would not have to go through the tedious online transaction process and they would be taking the safalta card from someone they trust. The disadvantage being, we had to travel throughout and connect with these centres and manage them.
👉 We were partnering with coaching institutes, making seller partners for our Safalta Card at a pace but the transactions were slow to come. The users were slow to come. We managed to reach our first milestone of 10,000 users in July 2018 (4 months from when we started)
TRANSITION PHASE : Finally in August 2018, we decided to move ahead with introducing online payment on our app. We got our first online transaction attempt on August 21. We did not have a support team back then to call users that tried to pay online. In case a user attempted to pay multiple times and failed, we would call them up and ask what the issue was.
👉 This was the time when Jail Prahari exam was scheduled in MP. We had a few buyers on our app and the test attempts on our Daily Doses were increasing slightly as well.
LEARNINGS : Maintaining an offline sales channel is very tough, rewarding people for bringing in sign ups is not such a good idea, penetration of internet and knowledge of online payment is immense but there still are a great number of users who face issues in transacting online and building a brand matters (trust among users for your product is really important)
Next Up : How one exam changed the whole scenario and functioning of our app : The Rise of MP Pariksha
Want to check out the app? https://pariksha.page.link/parikshablog
