Walmart-backed PhonePe winds down its Pincode app in yet another e-commerce step back

In its latest retreat from India’s crowded online retail market, Walmart-backed fintech giant PhonePe has wound down its Pincode e-commerce app and will shift the business toward B2B services for offline merchants.

On Thursday, PhonePe founder and group CEO Sameer Nigam said operating a consumer-facing quick-commerce app had become a distraction from the company’s core focus on small retailers. The company instead wants to concentrate on helping stores “achieve operational efficiency, improved margins and visibility,” he said, citing this as its primary objective.

PhonePe launched Pincode in April 2023 as a major push into e-commerce, building it on the Indian government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). The hyperlocal app offered groceries, medicines, food, electronics, and home décor from neighbourhood shops. It rolled out first in Bengaluru and later expanded to other cities.

Within a little over a year of launch, Pincode pulled out of most categories except food. Earlier this year, the app shifted to a quick-commerce model, offering 10-minute deliveries through local kirana shops and retailers in cities such as Bengaluru, New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune. The company also expanded the service to 10-minute medicine deliveries in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Pune in April.

PhonePe’s Pincode utilized local shops and retail stores for its quick deliveries — a contrast to rivals like Swiggy, Zomato-owned Blinkit, and Zepto, which rely on dark stores. The shift did not help Pincode gain ground in the crowded segment, prompting PhonePe to wind down the service.

Pincode was not PhonePe’s first move into e-commerce. In 2019, the company launched “Switch,” a super-app layer inside its payments app that offered access to food, grocery, shopping, and travel services.

PhonePe has now shut down the Pincode app and redirected its website to PhonePe’s main site. The company said it will now focus on working with offline retailers by expanding its B2B offerings. In July, PhonePe said it had digitized over 1,000 local stores across Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Varanasi through Pincode, giving them access to digital storefronts, inventory tools, and last-mile delivery services.

“As part of this strategic decision, we will now focus the entire Pincode team’s resources towards accelerating the build-out and scale-up of a suite of B2B business solutions for offline businesses across India,” Vivek Lohcheb, CEO of Pincode, said in a prepared statement.

PhonePe already offers inventory and order-management tools, as well as other ERP software for small businesses, and provides direct sourcing and replenishment services in some categories.

The shift comes as PhonePe prepares for a public listing in India, nearly three years after its spin-off from Flipkart. The company filed draft papers with the Securities and Exchange Board of India through the confidential pre-filing route in September and is targeting a mid-2026 listing. PhonePe is also looking for ways to grow beyond its position as the country’s dominant payments app on the Unified Payments Interface.

PhonePe did not respond to detailed questions about Pincode’s performance and the timing of the app’s shutdown.