Digital payments firms running on UPI railroad are exploring super app strategy by aggregating several utility apps on its platform. Of these, train ticket, hotel, flight, cab booking, food ordering, grocery and other daily use apps are getting layered around payments.
After Paytm, Google Pay, PhonePe, e-commerce giant Amazon is joining super app race via its payments platform – Amazon Pay.
The Seattle-based company, which already provides flight and movie ticket booking via Cleartrip and BookMyShow, is going to offer train, bus and hotel ticket booking soon.
The move will also make it compete with its arch-rival Flipkart on yet another front. The Walmart-controlled e-commerce marketplace also offers a suite of similar services on its web and mobile app.
According to a TOI report, Amazon is in talks with leading players in the category across hotel and train ticket booking to leverage Amazon Pay beyond payments.
Since Amazon Pay has been able to retain daily shoppers on its platform as well as customers who order food, grocery among others through discount and offers, adding more services via third-party apps is just another way to increase the frequency on its platform.
After capturing the market for product e-commerce, firms are now eyeing selling non-product categories in order to increase the frequency of purchase on its platform. Flipkart had launched offerings such as flight, hotel and bus tickets last year in an attempt to bring more customers on its platform and with the hopes of these transactions forming a good chunk of its revenue in the coming years. Now, Amazon in following suit.
In case of Amazon, this move is also targeted to incentivise non-shoppers across tier II and tier III market so that can become regular customers of Amazon Pay.
Amazon is splurging a huge amount of capital into the payment entity in India. The Jeff Bezos-led firm had invested over Rs 750 crore in the calendar year 2019. On the lines of PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm, Amazon Pay lost Rs 1,160.8 crore against Rs 834.5 crore revenue in FY19.
The four leading payments firms together lost over $1 billion to chase discount-led growth in FY19.
Apart from aggregating, hotel, bus and train ticket booking apps, the payment arm of the firm is set to onboard third-party insurance products on its platform. According to Entrackr‘s sources, the company is working with its investee firm ToneTag for enabling quick offline payments.
