Spice Digital enters online recharge market; launches Spice Deck

Spice Digital, the digital media arm of the Spice Group, has launched Spice Deck, an online recharge service for mobile phone and DTH. The company would also add more services soon, according to its portal.

The user can log in through a Facebook account or an account on Spice Online's e-commerce platform Saholic, or generate an account on Spice Deck. Apart from the recharge facility, other value-added features of the website are coupons for Saholic, online wallet plus loyalty points on every transaction.

With this launch, Spice will now compete with players like Paytm, Freecharge. The online recharge segment has been witnessing some action of late. Recently, horizontal e-commerce player Yebhi.com launched online recharge on its portal.

The user interface is simple and recharge happens without a glitch,  Freecharge and Paytm definitely score in look and feel. There is not much clarity on how to use the free credits. On signing up users get 50 credits free, with which you can buy a Rs 10 recharge, but how that is taken care of while making payment is confusing.

With many players in the market, there are multiple models of operation as well. While Paytm offers discount coupons of different brands with every recharge irrespective of the amount, Freecharge offers discount coupons in proportion to the amount of recharge and Yebhi offers normal recharge without incentives. A no-frills recharge is also available at certain banks' websites. Spice has chosen to promote its in-house e-shop Saholic through its recharge portal. Saholic is an online shop for handsets and mobile accessories dealing in all major brands including Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Blackberry, HTC, Sony Ericsson.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)