'Pay With Amazon' Processing Service Now in India

Amazon has brought its 'Pay with Amazon' service to India, with people on social networks reporting seeing the site.

Srinivas Rao, General Manager Payments, Amazon India confirmed that Pay with Amazon went live on Wednesday with Fommy.co.in and Shopyourworld.com - other sellers who will be offering the Pay with Amazon option soon include Babyoye.com, Wemallindia.com, Cart2india.com, Sapnaonline.com and Mebelkart.com as well. The company had rolled the service out in the US around 1 year ago.

"With Pay with Amazon we aim to provide a trusted payment bridge between customers and sellers and further aid and support the growth and integration of small and medium businesses in the new digital economy," Rao said in an emailed statement. "Customers, selecting this option will use the convenient, easy and trusted Amazon checkout process secure in the knowledge that their purchase is protected by Amazon's Buyer protection program."

"Sellers can tap into the growing base of online users by converting their static websites into digital storefronts, enabling them to reach Amazon shoppers across India," said Rao. "Through an easy set up process and integrated order management and payments, 'Pay with Amazon' helps sellers completely outsource their transactional needs, focus on the core business of sourcing and generate higher return on investment."

In the explanatory video, Amazon is trying to highlight that for customers, having to enter your payment details for each site, and build a customer profile in different places is a very cumbersome process - and that is true. While Pay with Amazon might actually simplify the act of paying, you're still going to have to key in your OTP to verify the purchase, since the service does not function as a wallet, only a payment processor.

Since you have to enter your payment and delivery details to set up your Amazon account, the service means that you can skip entering these details on any third party website that supports Pay with Amazon. This requires most users to have already set up an Amazon account, which might not be the case in India.

From a seller perspective the trade-off is between a simpler login system for users on one hand, and the fact that Amazon is collecting all the user data instead of you on the other. For many companies, this consumer insight could be more valuable. And of course if you are an online business, do you really want your customers thinking about Amazon when they're about to pay you?

Flipkart had rolled out Payzippy in July 2013, its own payments service, which had signed on Babyoye along with some other e-commerce sites including MakeMyTrip and Yebhi.com. At the end of August, it was reported that Flipkart is going to phase out Payzippy - which reports speculate is because Payzippy could not become a digital wallet.