Amazon Pay Smart Store to bring attractive offers to customers : Girish Krishnan, Director, Amazon Pay Rewards

Amazon Pay Smart Store is a unique offline shopping experience that would improve in-store sales by offering affordability propositions across the broadest array of payment options. It would also strengthen Amazon Pay’s endeavour to digitally empower offline SMBs, retailers, and micro merchants in India. Last week, the global e-commerce giant announced onboarding 18,000 merchants across India’s cities and towns.

Girish Krishnan, Director of Amazon Pay Rewards, told The Plunge Daily that the company is soon going to offer attractive offers for customers at its newly launched Smart Stores in India. “In the next 30 days, we will launch instant bank discounts in offline smart stores, especially before Diwali. This will be a huge customer experience boost to merchants across the country where people can get different bank offers and get a discount on their purchase,” said Krishnan in a Twitter space discussion on Wednesday hosted by The Plunge Daily and attended by Lloyd Mathias, a leading business strategist and angel investor. 

Girish Krishnan said these Smart Stores would not only be a game-changer for offline retailers across the country but would also benefit customers everywhere in India, especially in smaller towns. In response to a question by Mathias, Krishnan said the program will greatly enable customers to discover offline stores and make them more transparent and credit-friendly.

“We will work to improve the location-based discovery of our app so that wherever the customers are, they can quickly find out all the stores around them. Easy credit for customers is important.  We would make it simple for customers to get credit and financing to buy these products. There would be more transparency, as we want the customer to be able to access information and check what they consume from the store,” Krishnan said. “Affordability is a big area for us. We also want to communicate all the offers very clearly”, he added. 

The program will facilitate improvements in the offline shopping experience to provide seamless credit to offline shoppers, improve discoverability for offline stores, and offer various affordability propositions for customers. It would also help retailers in a big way in reaching out to a huge customer base in even Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The program offers merchants across India a unique opportunity to expand their business. “Seller lending is an area we are also looking at closely,” Krishnan said. 

To avail of these facilities, customers can shop across 1000-1500 electronics stores in Hyderabad, Warangal, Nizamabad, Nalgonda, Khammam, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Guntur, Nellore, Tirupati, Kurnool, and Rajahmundry, apart from those in other parts of the country. The Amazon Pay Smart Stores program has onboarded thousands of local shops nationwide to reach out to customers everywhere. “We will scale it across all the categories. Any merchant who signs up for smart stores would feel encouraged about that experience,” Krishnan said.

Several top brands, including OPPO, Lenovo, HP, Xiaomi, Samsung, Prestige, USHA, ASUS, More, Pepe Jeans, CCD, Barista, Miniso, and Puma, have already partnered with Amazon Pay to offer customers the best value and in-store purchasing experience through the program.