Google Pay, one of the distinguished players in the online payments sphere is now darting at the smaller offline retailers, famously called ‘Kirana Stores’.
It is now testing a service that allows users to transfer money via UPI while purchasing offline products. To complete the transaction process, users have to share their mobile number at the billing counter where the consumer/customer receive a ‘collect’ popup request on the Google Pay app. For this, customers will have to insert their UPI PIN on the app and finish the payment procedure.
Currently, the pilot testing is being run around a few retail stores in India, and the service is likely to roll out in the next few months.
India is one of the significant growth marketplaces. Google Pay with this strategy seeking to step up its offline services to provide more payment solutions for the users. With the vision, the company is primarily targeting the consumer-retail interface.
Google had launched Google Tez in 2017 as a payments and commerce app to support both online and offline payments. The application uses a contact list of the user, avoiding the need to add people to use bank account numbers.
The digital payments application in August 2018, changed the name from Google Tez to Google Pay. The US-based search company also assured that it would help in assisting the small business to grow and get discovered with Google Search and Maps.
The features were being tested with the retailers in Bengaluru and Delhi. The initiation is similar to that of homegrown digital payment and unicorn startup Paytm that allows users to make payments at Kirana stores, parking tolls, restaurants, pharmacies and more with the Paytm QR codes.
The recent data states that Paytm heads in the race with 221 million transactions while PhonePe and Google Pay spotted nearly 220 million transactions.
Phone Pe, owned by Flipkart is also invading the offline payment space and has over 1 million offline merchants on its application.
