Amazon India now offers food payments

Amazon India is testing a new path to conquer the Indian market after shutting down its food delivery business last year: Now it is trying its hand at food payments at restaurants. The company has started a limited rollout of bill payments at restaurants using Amazon Pay.

This initiative is being rolled out in select areas of Bangalore with a limited number of restaurants. Users can go to Amazon Pay > Dining in the Amazon app to make payments using credit/debit cards, net banking, UPI, or Amazon Pay Later. Thus, Amazon India currently offers bill payment discounts at almost all the restaurants in the listing.

The company has yet to comment on whether they are testing this in any other cities. Amazon India spokespersons did not respond to a request for comment.

Food delivery giants Zomato and Swiggy are offering payments and discounts at the restaurant as they try to attract more customers. Earlier this month, Zomato launched its own UPI service in partnership with ICICI Bank for faster checkout and bill payment processing.

This new Amazon experiment is one way to succeed in attracting customers in India. There are huge challenges in this country, so it is challenging to reach smaller cities in the country, according to a report by investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein. The e-commerce giant claims that 85% of its customers are from tier 2/3 cities/towns.

Amazon India has a Lite Prime version

Early this year, Amazon tested in India a Lite version of its Amazon Prime subscription with a 33% price cut. 

The new Amazon Prime Lite subscription in India has a reduced price of 999 rupees per year, equivalent to approximately 11.30 euros, compared to the 1,499 rupees that usually cost the service, which is about 17 euros.

The differences in the Lite version are not to reduce the amount of content on Amazon Prime Video, but in exchange, they will not be able to watch HD content, limiting the quality to SD. In this subscription, Amazon will introduce ads, although, at the moment, it has yet to be known how it will do it. Nor will it be possible to access Amazon Prime Video content outside the applications for Android and iOS, although it is not known if they will serve the same for other platforms.

Strike and discontent 

According to a news released by India Today journalist Ankita Garg, over 2000 Amazon employees started a strike today due to poor working conditions, new office rules, and recent job cuts. 

The situation could potentially damage Amazon's capabilities in the next 24 hours or even completely stop the operations if the strike grows larger, with more employees joining it. 

So far, Amazon has not acknowledged the strike nor made any comments.