Official Blog of GTM360 Marketing Solutions
Rufus is Amazon’s Generative AI chatbot. Whenever you have a question about a product you’re browing on the Amazon website or app, you can click the Rufus button and ask away. You can converse with Rufus in normal language (Natural Language) just as you’d with ChatGPT. Around six months ago, I was in the market … Read more
People started complaining about the decline in quality of Google Search around a decade ago. Accordingly, many pundits predicted the demise of Google Search in the then near future. But, for reasons I speculated in my blog post entitled The End Of Google Search Is Not Nigh, it did not happen. Then came ChatGPT at … Read more
I recently covered the primary issues related to the ban of UPI by small merchants: Do small merchants make so much money? Why refuse UPI? Why avoid GST? Are small merchants evading GST? What about Income Tax? In this blog post, I’ll explore some secondary issues. For the sake of completeness, I’ll continue with the … Read more
Facing mounting GST notices, many small merchants in Bangalore and elsewhere in the state of Karnataka are declining UPI and other digital payments, and insisting on cash from their customers. They include streetfood vendors, pushcart sellers, and khirana stores (India’s version of mom-and-pop stores selling grocery). This is causing major inconvenience to consumers who have … Read more
Whenever they hear that something is free, some find it fashionable to remark that “there’s no free lunch” or “you’re paying in a different way”. In other words, these people insinuate that there’s always a “hidden cost” behind free products and services. On the face of it, their counterpoint seems to be right. After all, … Read more
In Five Pricing Paradoxes, we covered many pricing paradoxes and speculated on why they happen. In this post, we will examine if and how they need to be fixed. Is There A Problem? While there’s a logic to pricing paradoxes, we cannot expect the Average Customer to accept them. As a result, they will complain about … Read more
According to common wisdom, middleman adds a margin, so his price will be higher than the original manufacturer’s price. Why do D2C brands price their products higher on their own website and make them cheaper on marketplaces like Amazon? I always assumed buying from their website is cheaper, given they save on commissions. What's the … Read more
Since times immemorial, merchants have complained that banks charge exorbitant fees for processing credit card payments. Called Merchant Discount Rate (MDR), this fee is around 2% of the transaction value, as described in my blog post titled Credit Card Primer – Interchange, MDR & Surcharge. In this post, I will shatter the myth that MDR … Read more
This post provides a quick primer on MDR, Interchange, and Surcharge, and covers a few recent updates to rules around these key concepts in the credit card industry. 1. Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) When you buy something worth $100 and pay with a credit card, the merchant gets $97.62. The difference of $2.38 is the … Read more
Among others, the credit card value chain comprises the following entities: Consumer (aka Customer, Cardholder), who uses the credit card to pay for the purchase Merchant (aka Store, Retailer), who sells what the consumer purchases Issuer Bank, which issues the credit card to the consumer Acquirer Bank, which issues the POS terminal and Merchant Agreement, … Read more