Amazon India seems to have quietly added a UPI based payments option for customers who are making purchases on the website. The development was spotted by members of the r/india subreddit who also noticed that Amazon is using an @apl virtual payments address for collecting payments. Medianama was able to verify the existence of the same as the UPI payment option pops up during the checkout process. The e-commerce giant's silent launch of UPI is an interesting development as it becomes the first major entity to use UPI for only collecting payments. At the time of check out customers can select UPI as a payment option. After doing so the user will be asked to enter their existing VPA which will take a couple of seconds to verify. Upon successful verification, the customer is taken to the corresponding UPI ID-linked mobile app to complete the payment. The payment request from Amazon is made by its own unique VPA @apl unlike existing UPI based services by non-banking entities (Tez and Whatsapp for example). Currently, the UPI payment method is available for transactions less than Rs 10,000 and is only accessible on Amazon’s mobile app. We tried to make the same purchase on the desktop but the UPI option was not available. Note that even if Amazon allows UPI integration on it's desktop site the user will still have to finalise the payment via the UPI app on their mobile phone. In October 2017, Amazon India head, Amit Agarwal had said that Amazon Pay will be…
