Amazon Experiments With Dine-In Payments in India

Amazon is experimenting with dine-in payments in India via Amazon Pay.

TechCrunch reported on the change Monday (May 30), noting that users dining at some restaurants in select areas of Bengaluru can make payments under the “dining” section of Amazon Pay on the Amazon app.

The report notes that food delivery giants Zomato and Swiggy each offer in-restaurant payments, while Zomato recently rolled out its own UPI service in partnership with the ICICI bank for faster checkout and bill payment.

It also points out that India’s National Restaurant Association issued an advisory to members last year warning against dining payment offerings from food delivery firms.

PYMNTS has contacted Amazon India for comment but has not yet received a reply.

Amazon last year shut down its Indian food delivery service — dubbed Amazon Food — as part of a larger series of cost-cutting efforts in the country. The company had been testing the program in Bengalaru since May 2020.

“We don’t take these decisions lightly,” an Amazon spokesperson told PYMNTS in an emailed statement at the time. “We are discontinuing these programs in a phased manner to take care of current customers and partners.”

The pilot is happening as Amazon finds itself playing defense against rival Walmart on the Indian eCommerce front, where Walmart has been able to grab a greater market share due to its ownership of Flipkart.

It’s also happening at a time when restaurants are seeing record revenues, with sales up 20% relative to pre-pandemic, Tony Smith, co-founder and CEO at restaurant management software company Restaurant365, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster recently.

However, Smith said that with that new opportunity comes more labor challenges, which necessitates the need for simplified payments.

“When we look across our base, we see dine-in, on average, making as much money as it made pre-pandemic,” Smith said. “But then, we also see … new channels … like online ordering, curbside delivery, or some of them even extended their outdoor patio, and those things are now making more money. … Why can their sales be 20% higher? Well, they’ve learned how to sell even more food out of the same square feet.”

In fact, research from PYMNTS’ study “Connected Dining: Rising Costs Push Consumers Toward Pickup,” which pulled from a survey of more than 2,100 U.S. consumers earlier this year, found that, while 51% of diners had ordered their most recent meal for on-site dining, 39% had gotten their last restaurant order through pickup and 10% via delivery.