Amazon Pay India, earlier known as Amazon Online Distribution Services, has been given a capital of ₹67 crore by Amazon Capital Holdings, Singapore and Amazon.com Inc. Ltd., Mauritius. This info was found in documents filed with the Registrar of Companies (RoC). In September 2016, the company had raised ₹150 crore, increasing its total share capital to ₹400 crore.
Amazon Pay was provided with a wallet license by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in March 2017. With the wallet license, Amazon Pay’s main focus right now is converting existing Amazon users into customers of their wallet. Through this, the company is hoping to build a full-stack online payment method. To provide an incentive to the customers to start using the wallet, the marketplace has been providing cashback as well as purchase-linked benefits.
According to an Amazon spokesperson,
We recently launched Amazon Pay where customers can fund their pre-paid balance using internet banking and credit or debit card for smooth purchases and payments. With this, customers can go cashless and enjoy fast and easy checkouts, quicker refunds coupled with a secured shopping experience.
Efforts of Amazon to encourage its customers to use the wallet option came to fruition during the Great Indian Sale from May 11th to May 14th. According to Manish Tewary, Vice President of category management at Amazon India, the number of users topping up their Amazon Wallet balance grew to over 10 times during non-sale days.
In an interview with Economic Times, Sriram Jagganathan, the Vice President of payments at Amazon India added,
With the wallet, we are looking to reduce the friction in payments for an Amazon customer and working with banks closely for this. Users can keep track of their transactions on the platform with the wallet. This especially helps people ordering on mobile phones where the transaction is one click.
He further said that Amazon Pay would use its recent capital income of ₹67 crore to ramp up merchant acquisition as well as create use-cases around small-ticket transactions through the instrument. Amazon Pay is also trying to expand offline and currently works with a few such outlets including Crocs and Cafe Coffee Day.
