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In just about 15 months, and despite the Covid-19 headwinds, Amazon Pay India has enabled over 50 lakh small business owners and entrepreneurs to accept digital payments, its Chief Executive Officer, Mahendra Nerurkar, has said. The company recently rolled out the ‘Amazon Pay for Business’ mobile app to simplify acceptance of digital payments for small and medium businesses (SMBs).
“Our focus now is going to be how we can make the entire experience digital, not just the process of accepting payments, but even the on-boarding process. . I am very optimistic that the time taken for bringing new digital payment acceptance in the next 50 lakh merchants will be much shorter,”Nerurkar told BusinessLine . “The pandemic may have created headwinds, but it has also brought opportunity for innovation,” he added.
The plan ahead
Going forward, Amazon Pay India’s focus will be on driving digital adoption in a safe and a contactless manner. “We want to figure out how a store owner or a home merchant can simply get started without anybody physically visiting him/her. That is going to be a very important accelerator on how we reach different merchants,” Nerurkar said.
Nerukar said that the 50 lakh that have joined the platform, more than 25 lakh operate retail and shopping outlets, about 10 lakh run food and beverage outlets, over 5 lakh offer services such as salons, close to 4 lakh offer health and medical care while the remaining work as taxi and drivers, plumbers and more.
Greater reach
Nerurkar said that increasingly more than 60 per cent of the merchants are coming beyond tier-1 and -2 cities. “Many are joining through word of mouth and self service. It is humbling to see the rate at which merchants in India are embracing digital payments that has been accelerated by the pandemic.Today, digital adoption is a countrywide phenomena,” he said.
From initially focussing on solving problems of friction in the digital payments, Amazon Pay India later expanded its offerings to digitising cash, enabling access to credit and then getting into bill payments. Now, it has enabled SMBs to use all forms of payments.
“A dedicated app is an easy way to keep a tab on payments. Our vision is to make the app a starting point for any merchant to avail the services that Amazon Pay has to offer,” he said.
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