Amazon Targets India’s Mobile Shoppers

Amazon is a presence to be reckoned with when it comes to online shopping, and mobile shopping in particular.

While it’s become a major force in the United States and beyond, reports suggest that its newest big target is the Indian market.

While Amazon is already a presence in India, over half of its customers are still using cash for online purchases, and that means a real opportunity to push mobile payment systems.

India has a fifth of the world’s population, but just 12 percent of its Internet users. Between those two facets, that spells opportunity on a grand scale.

With a host of local shops serving as not only payment centers but also pick-up points for goods purchased online, it means a widely scattered populace that might well welcome a bit more convenience and order in their online shopping.

To that end, Amazon purchased Emvantage, an Indian online payments firm that gives Indian users better access to online shopping, complete with mobile prepaid wallet.

An easy access point for mobile payments—particularly one that depends on the mobile device that an increasingly large number of Indians is already putting to use—might be just the thing to take that comparatively slim number of online shoppers up into a whole new level of use.

Amazon might have learned a lesson from its Chinese ventures, where Alibaba brought out Alipay, and JD.com got together with Tencent to put WeChat to use in payments.

It’s not always enough to offer the goods; it’s also got to make it easy and convenient to pay for the goods as well. That likely wasn’t a problem in Europe and North America, but in the Asia-Pacific regions, that might be more of an issue than even the forward-thinking Amazon expected.

Up shot, however; the region’s extremely dense population might make it prime turf for Amazon’s drone delivery aspirations. That kind of service coupled with an easy way to pay could make Amazon top dog in the subcontinent.

It’s an interesting plan, and might be one that pays off in the long term.

Certainly, many other businesses have discovered the value of offering their own mobile payments systems, and there’s no reason Amazon can’t find that same value in its Indian operations. It’s likely to prove valuable in the end, and give Amazon a new revenue push.