Xiaomi Adds Google Tez Payment Option on Mi.com, Mi Store App

Xiaomi on Wednesday announced that its customers on Mi.com and the Mi Store app can now make payments through Google Tez. The latest development is touted to be another step by the Chinese company to contribute to government's Digital India initiative. Earlier this month, Google announced that its Tez app had surpassed the mark of 12 million active users in India.

Leveraging the new integration, Xiaomi customers will be provided with an option to select Google Tez as a payment source on Mi.com and the Mi Store app. This new option will accept payments using Tez UPI IDs.

The addition of Tez as a payment option on Xiaomi's e-commerce platforms will expand the transaction count on the UPI-based digital payments app that was launched in India back in September. Since its launch, the app has already processed over 140 million transactions - seeing a growth rate of four times in average transaction size, as revealed by Google's Product Management VP Caesar Sengupta earlier this month.

Xiaomi highlights in a press statement that Mi.com on an average gets over 21 million unique visitors in one month and over a million daily active users, whereas the Mi Store app on Google Play has over 20 million app installs with more than six million organic downloads to date. All this would give a boost to Google Tez to some extent in the coming future. Moreover, the Google Tez integration would give Xiaomi customers another reason to use its e-commerce platforms against competitive online marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart, as this would give them the option to pay for their purchases directly using their Tez UPI IDs.

"Xiaomi is currently the number one smartphone brand with a dominant online smartphone market share of 50.8 percent, of which a significant portion is attributed to Mi.com. With this new payment option, we hope to provide an even better purchasing experience that is truly cashless," said Raghu Reddy, Head - Online Sales, Xiaomi India, in the statement.

The Google Tez app garnered over four lakh active users within a day of its launch and hit the mark of five million downloads on Play Store in October. Competing against Flipkart's PhonePe, the app garnered over 7.5 million users in five months since its launch and eventually reach the user base of over 12 million users.