Amazon Pay to ramp up Smart Stores service partnership to 150 brands

The company has launched 18,000 Smart Stores in India since its inception in 2019

Amazon Pay, the digital payments arm of etailer Amazon India, will add 20 more brands this year to its Smart Store offering, taking total brand partnerships to 150, a senior executive said.
 

Smart Store allows a physical store to launch a digital shopfront, letting customers find products, read reviews, and evaluate offers from the store or anywhere using the Amazon app.
 

Brands such as HP, Prestige, Oppo, and Himalaya offer their goods currently and the Bengaluru-based company has launched 18,000 Smart Stores in the country since its inception in 2019.
 

“We could have launched Smart Stores at a higher velocity," said Girish Krishnan, director – payments, rewards & merchant services, Amazon Pay, but the firm was putting more focus on "making sure that the right inputs are there," he added.
 

Krishnan said the "top 15-20 brands" may this year join Smart Store, which showcases categories such as electronics, mobiles, beauty, restaurants, kitchen products, fashion, and appliances.

 

Offline focus
 

Krishnan said some categories, such as consumer durables, saw more than 90 per cent of sales happening offline. While the company has rolled it out across thousands of stores and seen good traction, merchants have also seen sales rising about 10 to 20 per cent, he added.
 

A Smart Store solves multiple challenges that users encounter during offline shopping — discovering products, making informed choices, affordability, and acceptance of different payment instruments being a few of them, said Krishnan.

"There are no online prices, no distractions. It only shows you the products, reviews, ratings. It then allows you to browse all the offers, which are available only in the store,” he said.

Customers get to use a payment instrument of their choice and the firm says it wants to scale up its pay-later service. "With the corporate credit card, the idea is that all people going to stores should have easy access to credit. That is a long-term vision for us,” he said, adding that with Amazon Pay’s Pay Later, customers can get a credit between Rs 20,000 and Rs 50,000.

The company has over 8 million pay-later lines available, and its Amazon Pay-ICICI co-branded credit card has more than 4 million customers.

 

No impact of RBI move
 

The company says its credit business has not seen any dip in numbers on an aggregate basis despite the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) hiking risk weighting on unsecured personal loans last year.
 

“We have grown our (credit) limits. We are also very thoughtful in terms of giving credit line to customers," said Krishnan.

He said the firm hadn't changed its strategy and had seen steady adoption in the market.

"We have been able to offer the full suite of payment instruments, and we have not seen a dip in any of these numbers. Our partnership with the brands is very agnostic of the merchant. So we talk to the brands or banks, and then often with the merchants, whether they want to participate in some of these programmes,” Krishnan said.

The official says the strategy is to offer better payment instruments and enable customer engagement with its services simultaneously.
 

The company received a nod for a payment aggregator (PA) licence from the RBI last month.
 

“With the PA licence now, we can scale up our merchant business significantly. We can open up the entire set of instruments that we provide to our merchants. It also allows us to offer all the affordability suites, the credit products we have, across all the merchants,” he said. 

In the cart

130 brands currently partner Amazon Pay Smart Store

15-20 brands  across electronics, mobiles, beauty, and others to join soon

15-20% rise in merchant sales

Rs 20,000 - Rs 50,000 credit available for customers using Amazon Pay Later