Even though Paypal is almost dead for Indian SMEs, there is a huge opportunity to build a global product targeting Paypal users.
Small businesses need a better understanding of sales/top selling products, revenue split etc and this is exactly what an Indian startup, Putler is targeting with its newly launched product.
Putler is a cross platform tool to track, analyze and act on PayPal data. It lets you track sales trends, product performance, customer contribution and set monthly targets / issue refunds. It’s designed for web entrepreneurs who wear multiple hats and want an easy to use tool to track their business.
There are a few nifty features built in Putler that makes it a great tool to use:
- Offline Access: Putler brings updates from PayPal, so you don’t need to login to PayPal. And you can continue using it even without an Internet connection. Search, filter, drill down, analyze – almost everything is available offline.
- Forecasts: Putler analyzes your monthly sales trend and forecasts this month’s sales. This will enable you to take actions accordingly (i.e. whether you need to push marketing efforts or spend some dough in adwords etc etc).
- Targets: You can set a monthly sales target and Putlertracks progress automatically.
- Cross Linking: Putler automatically links important information – customer names, emails, product names, transaction IDs etc
- Support for Multiple Currency: If you maintain balance in multiple currencies in PayPal, Putler will let you see Sales, Products and Customers dashboards in a currency of your choice.
- Data resides on your computer (and not on any third party server).
The product follows a mix of freemium plus one-time buy plus subscription pricing and works on all Windows, Mac and Linux desktops (requires Adobe AIR runtime).
We earlier profiled AnalyzePal (which is a dead product now) and asked founder of Putler a few questions:
Qn: There are quite a few other tools that achieve similar functionality. What’s your USP?
Actually, there aren’t many other tools. GaragePay is one tool that comes close (and something that works). But it’s only for Mac. There is TeraPeak which is web based and does a lot of analytics. But it does not provide details of items sold in each transaction. BalanceBar – which came three weeks ago – only shows PayPal balance and is only for Mac.
Tools like Mint / inDinero / LessAccounting / Xero (and the whole personal finance gamut) can import PayPal data, but they are all “expense tracking” focused and do a lousy job at understanding currencies. So they don’t understand the difference between USD and INR and treat them equally. Imagine your sales figure in lacs because you made a withdrawal in INR.
Now that we’ve looked at competition, let’s come to USP.
Putler is built for web entrepreneurs (and by a web entrepreneur ;-). It is designed to save a ton of time and spark insights that help one understand his business better – all this leading to higher sales and higher customer satisfaction. I have personally made a lot more money using Putler than without it. Simply by being able to take decisions based on real data, than on my gut feeling. Putler shows you your transactions data from different perspectives – most of which don’t exist in any other solution. Putler is built to help in day to day operations (finding a transaction, issuing refunds, keeping track of balance) as well as strategic analysis (top products, returning vs new customers, 80-20 etc).
Putler is cross platform, is super fast and it also looks good !
Qn: How will you market this product from India (considering that Paypal is dead in India, so you have lost the immediate potential customers)?
First, PayPal is actually not dead yet. They have switched to credit cards for intra-India payments and I don’t think their current limits – $500/transaction and withdrawal within 7 days of delivery – are too bad for most people. The real hassle is getting FIRCs from Deutsch Bank – but that’s another thing. And I surely believe the axe will fall on 2Checkout / others in future as well. PayPal is still a very good, viable option for Indian merchants.
I also believe that majority of Putler customers will be from outside India. So far, we have people from around the world.
Marketing the product sitting in India – is a challenge in itself. It wasn’t a problem for my earlier products since we piggy backed on activeCollab. But this time it’s a new turf. I am currently trying to get in touch with tech blogs to profile Putler. Will be pursuing influencing individuals next. Possibly other avenues as well. But I think I should speak more on this once I have had some success!
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Important to recall that Putler founder, Nirav Mehta has a very inspiring story to tell: From Zero to Six Figures ($$) in 2 Years–How an Indian Startup Rose From The Ashes [Inspirational]
Do give Putler a spin and share your feedback with the team.
