With many tie-ups, Amazon goes big on its mobile wallet

Mobile wallet has partnered with movie ticketing platform Justickets, portals abhibus and redBus

After marketplace, groceries, exclusive membership plans and entertainment, online marketplace giant Amazon India is now going all out to make big its mobile wallet Amazon Pay.

Thanks to tie-ups with tours and travel portals, movie ticketing platforms, online food tech firms and bricks-and-mortar retailers, Amazon is coming up with a variety of deals this festive season to make relevant its mobile wallet everywhere, and not just for buying on its platform.

The e-commerce major secured payments wallet licence from Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in April and is looking to boost savings and retain customers within its ecosystem as it takes on rivals Paytm and PhonePe.

The mobile wallet has partnered with companies such as movie ticketing platform Justickets, portals abhibus and redBus, as well as Haptik, FreshMenu, Faasos, InnerChef and others. It has also brought onboard services companies such as housejoy, education app Byju's and offline chains such as Cafe Coffee Day and gems and jewellery major Orra.

Just like other players in the segment, Amazon Pay is offering a variety of cashbacks and discounts to make its customers use its wallet more. Not disclosing its plans, the company said it wants customers to use the wallet more and push for more transactions. There are around 350 million mobile wallet users in India and the transaction sizes vary from Rs 50 to Rs 4,000.

"Amazon Pay is a global payments product trusted by millions of customers worldwide. We introduced Amazon Pay in India to enable our customers to use the same fast and secure payments they get on Amazon.in with other popular merchants they shop from. Customers can load their balance on Amazon.in and use it across all the merchants in the network," the company said in an email response.

While Amazon closely guards the number of customers it has on its online marketplace or the number of users or transactions recorded by the wallet, its partner firms such as Haptik said that Amazon Pay would power at least five million of its users.

"Haptik has partnered with Amazon Pay to power transactions for its five million user base. Using Haptik, people can book flights, pay bills, buy local deals, all these transactions can now be made using Amazon Pay. Amazon has shown over the last few years that they want to be market leaders when it comes to e-commerce in India," said Aakrit Vaish, co-founder and chief executive of the firm.

Not divulging much, Sriram Jagannathan, vice-president of payments, Amazon India, had earlier said the company hoped the government and RBI would continue to encourage multiple ways to shift consumers from cash by recognising the value of digital wallets, used especially for making small payments to large merchants like IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation), utility and insurance companies.

Groceries, entertainment and now payments, Amazon has been trying to make e-commerce a habit among its customers in India and score over local rival Flipkart.

By concentrating on daily groceries via Amazon Now, membership-based e-commerce services and online video-streaming vertical Amazon Prime Video, the company has managed to create a large number of active and repeat customers.