While Flipkart is reportedly looking to tap online ticketing segment by buying stakes in BookMyShow, Amazon India has announced its partnership with BookMyShow which will allow users to use their Amazon Pay balance account for booking tickets via BookMyShow. This partnership is in addition to its existing range of merchants across verticals like Redbus (bus booking), Abhibus (bus booking), Faasos (food ordering), Box 8 (food ordering), Haptik (chatbot platform), Komparify (phone recharge and comparison platform) amongst others. Amazon said in a statement that with these partnerships, the company is driving customers to utilize their Amazon Pay balance beyond the marketplace, to merchants in categories like food ordering, travel, bill payments etc. Note that Amazon’s competitor in India Flipkart is adopting multi-forked strategies to battle against Amazon. Flipkart, which raised $2.5 billion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in August, and from Microsoft, eBay and Tencent in April, has been investing in companies to expand its verticals and up its e-commerce game in the country. The Indian e-tailer is reportedly also looking at adding various services like cab booking, food ordering, vacation etc on its app by end of this year. Shashi adds: With services being added, it looks like Flipkart is playing catchup with Snapdeal. In 2016, Snapdeal added Zomato for food ordering, Cleartrip and redBus for bus/flight/hotel bookings, and UrbanClap for home services on its app. After-sales customer support will be provided by the partnering entity for all services, while it will list call-center numbers of those companies on within the order page and ticket details.…
