Amazon India integrates UPI into its mobile interfaces

Online retailer Amazon.com, Inc.’s India arm said it has integrated into its mobile interfaces a governmental payment system called Unified Payments Interface. UPI allows money transfer between any two bank accounts through use of a smartphone, desktop or any other supporting device.

According to the company, the new payment method is available for all transactions up to Rs 10,000 on its mobile application and mobile web interface.

Last month, Amazon India launched doorstep services allowing customers to top up their Amazon Pay wallets by giving out hard cash to delivery agents arriving at their homes. The feature comes as an addition to the online transfer of funds from bank accounts and through credit and debit cards, the company said.

“With Amazon Pay, customers across India can now easily load cash at their doorstep once and pay digitally henceforth. One in every three of our cash-paying customers has already begun using the service,” Mahendra Nerurkar, director, Amazon Pay, had said.

Amazon India’s rival Flipkart, which runs its own wallet service PhonePe, allows UPI payments both on its app and its desktop. Last year in July, PhonePe had rolled out a payment solution for offline commerce. Back then, the company had said the wallet was being used for payments at 2,600 Apollo Pharmacy stores and Barista Coffee Company outlets in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi and Ahmedabad.

Last year, VCCircle had reported that Amazon India was preparing to inject fresh funds into its payments arm. Earlier, Amazon Pay had received two infusions, of $20 million and $10.67 million from its US-based parent Amazon.com, Inc. and Singapore-based arm Amazon Corporate Holdings Pvt. Ltd.

In October last year, Flipkart had committed to infuse $500 million (Rs 3,254 crore) into its payments arm PhonePe. PhonePe chief executive Sameer Nigam had said that the money would be used to scale up the company’s technology platform, besides expanding its merchant network and consumer base. The company had also set a target of 25 billion digital payments by next year.

Earlier that month, PhonePe had received an infusion of $38.7 million from Singapore-based group entity Flipkart Payments Pvt. Ltd.