Amazon Pay introduces services to help customers load cash in their wallet at doorstep

Amazon Pay on Friday launched its cash load service, which allows customers to add cash to their Amazon Pay balance account at their doorstep. This is an additional facility, apart from the existing services of adding money to the wallet through bank accounts as well as credit and debit cards.

In a statement, the company said this feature is useful for delivery environments where Amazon customers can ask delivery associates to add the leftover change, or provide additional amounts of up to Rs 10,000, to add into their Amazon Pay balance.

The cash-load service is available across India at all pin codes where Amazon logistics service delivers.

Commenting on the launch, Mahendra Nerurkar, Director Amazon Pay said,

“We continuously seek to enhance our customers’ payment experience and increase their preference for digital payments. With Amazon Pay cash load, customers across India can now easily load cash at their doorstep once and pay digitally henceforth. One in every thrre of our cash paying customer has already begun using the service and getting its benefits.”

Flipkart’s PhonePe on CoD

However, this is not the first time a retailer is using its payments arm to ease the inefficiencies of loose change around Cash-on-delivery.

In an interaction with YourStory, Flipkart payment arm PhonePe stated that there is always a problem of the delivery agents having to carry the exact change and mPoS devices. However, the service of loading the wallet with cash at your doorstep is not available with Flipkart's PhonePe.

Sameer Nigam, Co-founder of PhonePe explains,

“As soon as the shipment gets pushed out from the delivery hub in the morning, the customer gets a ping on the PhonePe app to pay for the product any time during the day. Customers can then pay using any instrument—UPI, the balance in their PhonePe wallet, a credit card or a debit card.”

Therefore, it allows users to act at a time of their choice—five minutes after the order, during the delivery window, or when the order lands at their doorstep.

Further, PhonePe also allows customers to forward payment requests to another individual, to pay and collect the order on their behalf.

On Thursday, the Economic Times had reported that on Amazon India, digital payments account for over 60 percent of total transactions as compared with less than 50 percent in 2016.

The report stated that Amazon Pay wallet accounted for 48 percent of all digital transactions on the e-commerce (Amazon) platform.

In October, Amazon had infused Rs 260 crore into its payments arm Amazon Pay to push its wallet and payment services.