Amazon India will soon launch payments services

Though Amazon was a late entrant to the Indian e-commerce landscape, it has been giving fierce competition to local poster boy, Flipkart. And now, to further strengthen the platform, Amazon India is planning to soon launch payments services.

In April, the Reserve Bank of India had given a nod to Amazon India to operate a pre-paid payment instrument (PPI). According to the media reports, the new platform won't be restricted only to Amazon services and will have a wider reach than what Amazon Pay currently has.

In an interview with Livemint, Amazon India head Amit Agarwal said, "Our most important priority for our payment investments has been to improve the experience of customers on Amazon.

"In that sense, this licence allows us to provide a more cashless experience and a more convenient experience to our customers. It will allow us to move customers away from a cash-based or payment on a delivery-based segment to a more prepaid digital segment. That’s our primary priority. Of course, we’ll try different experiments and see what happens," he further added.

Though Agarwal declined to shed more light on the payment services, he revealed that Amazon India is witnessing rapid growth from its Amazon Prime membership programme.

“One out of three units that are shipped by us are ordered by Prime customers—so, we’ve reached a point where we see a healthy loyalty that is allowing people to buy more and more. Just the Prime spend between January and May increased 100%—so our loyal base is buying more and we’re getting healthy customer inflow. If I look at the sale event in January versus May, it shows they’re shopping more,” said Agarwal.

Amazon India posted an 85 percent increase in gross sales volume in the fourth quarter from the year-ago period, growing much faster than the overall market.