Amazon India to add bus, train, hotel bookings

BENGALURU: Soon, you can buy bus tickets, book hotel rooms or even buy a train ticket from Amazon India. The e-commerce major is steadily building a super app-like play in India through its payments platform Amazon Pay.

The move comes even as the e-tailer is in process of adding new services that can be availed within the app or its website, two people aware of the matter said.

While it has launched flights (Cleartrip) and movie ticketing (BookMyShow) already, the company is set to roll out bus-booking via redBus (being tested with a few users). It is in talks with other platforms to bring hotels and train ticketing on Amazon, these people added.

Once launched, this would challenge Walmart-owned PhonePe, which has brought over 50 apps across travel, food delivery, etc, on its platform. Additionally, Google Pay, via its recently launched Spots platform, is also enabling availability of these services from within its app. Paytm would be another competitor but, unlike others, it has built these services on its own instead of bringing other apps on its platform.

For Amazon, this strategy is a push to incentivise consumers across metros and non-metros to transact more on the platform even when they are not buying products. Flipkart also offers flights and hotel bookings on its platform. Amazon, sources said, plans to offer more transaction-led incentives to its Prime users in India to boost its super app play on Amazon Pay. Prime users typically spend more on Amazon than non-Prime users.

“They (Amazon) are thinking of offering incentives for non-shopping transactions. Compared to urban markets, consumers in tier II or tier III don’t shop as often on Amazon. These services within the platform will bring them back and transact with Amazon Pay, which has been incentivising users,” another person aware of the goings-on added.

This is similar to China where Tencent-owned messaging application WeChat and Alibaba’s payments affiliate Alipay have a whole range of services within them. The success of the WeChat-like playbook is yet to be replicated here, but clearly companies like Amazon are placing a bet.An Amazon spokesperson confirmed it was working with redBus. “We would not like to comment on things we may or may not do in the future,” the spokesperson said on its plan to bring in hotel and train bookings onto Amazon. Separately, TOI had reported in August about its plan to enter food delivery via Prime Now — a standalone platform that delivers grocery and other products in two hours.

Amazon has been steadily investing in the unit that houses Amazon Pay here. In the last two years, it has pumped just under Rs 2,600 crore in the unit. A major chunk of this goes for cashbacks, marketing Amazon Pay and expanding its acceptance across online and offline channels.