Now, you can pay your mobile and electricity bills with Amazon Pay money

Amazon India has launched a bill payment facility that allows customers to pay electricity, landline, broadband, gas and postpaid bills across more than 100 billers in the country.

Customers can access these categories using the Amazon Pay dashboard and the Amazon home page on the mobile app/website. The service enables bill payments through most of the major billers across various cities in India. These include billers like BSES, Tata Power, BESCOM, BSNL, Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Jio, ACT, Hathway, IGL and MGL. Amazon drives customers to utilize their Amazon Pay account beyond the marketplace, to categories like Mobile Recharges, DTH Recharges, bill payments, travel, and movie booking use cases.

Amazon has also partnered with select billers, telecom and DTH operators to offer exclusive promotional offers to customers across recharges and bill payments. "The launch of bill payments on Amazon reinforces Amazon’s commitment to Indian customers to provide them new categories and a wide selection of services.," said Shariq Plasticwala, Director – Payments, Amazon India.

OnePlus 6 Red edition announced at Rs 39,999; sale starts from July 16

Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus on June 2 introduced the OnePlus 6 red colour edition. Although, the phone comes in three RAM and storage configurations – 6GB/64GB, 8GB/128GB and 8GB/256GB – the red edition will be available only in 8GB RAM and 128GB internal storage configuration. Priced at Rs 39,999, the phone will go on sale at Amazon India from July 16.

“We believe power and attitude can be both elegant and humble, and we have strived to achieve this with the OnePlus 6 Red Edition. We worked to avoid an overly bright red colour, while still capturing a sense of self-confidence and positivity. Achieving the amber-like effect took several months to refine and perfect,” said OnePlus CEO Pete Lau in a statement.

The OnePlus 6 sports a 6.28-inch 19:9 aspect ratio notch-based screen. Just like its predecessor, the phone's screen is of AMOLED breed with fullHD+ resolution. The phone boots Android Oreo-based OxygenOS 5.1 operating system, which also supports gesture-based on-screen navigation. The phone is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 system-on-chip (SoC), which is an octacore processor paired with Adreno graphic processing unit.

4G smartphones at Rs 3,399: Airtel, Amazon tie up for affordable devices

India’s largest telecommunications service provider Airtel and Amazon India, on Friday announced a strategic partnership with an aim to jointly drive smartphone adoption across the country.

Millions of Indians can now become first time owners of a 4G smartphone or upgrade to an advanced 4G smartphone of their choice at an affordable price from amongst a wide range of devices starting at an effective price of only Rs 3399.

Huawei P20 Pro, P20 Lite launch set for April 24; to go on sale via Amazon

Huawei, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer, will launch the Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 Lite smartphones in India on April 24. These devices will go on sale exclusively through Amazon India and the e-commerce platform has already put up a promotional page listing both the smartphones.

Unveiled earlier this month, the Huawei P20 Pro features the world’s first Leica-branded tri-camera module assisted by an artificial intelligence engine developed in-house by the company. The P20 Lite, on the other hand, is a trimmed-down version, featuring a design theme similar to the premium P20 Pro, but with midrange specifications, a smaller screen and dual rear cameras on the back.

Here are the key features of the Huawei P20 Pro and P20 Lite:

Huawei P20 Pro
The Huawei P20 Pro sports a 40-megapixel wide-angle lens with f/1.6 aperture, 20MP monochrome lens with f/1.8 aperture, and an 8MP telephoto lens with f/2.4 aperture, optimised by imaging experts at Leica, on the rear. The unique tri-camera enables 3x lossless optical zoom and 5x hybrid zoom capabilities.

Flipkart beats Amazon in festive season sales, captures 50% market share

Flipkart beat Amazon in sales during this year's festive season by a huge margin, reported the Economic Times. The Indian e-marketplace captured 50% of the festive market, while the American e-commerce behemoth trailed as the runner-up with a 35% share.

The Indian e-commerce market is reported to have grown by 40% in value over the last year. Online sales during the September-October festive season is estimated to have increased to $2.9 billion from $2 billion last year.

Amazon is said to have pocketed just Rs 2,500-2,700 cr during its Great Indian Festival Sale in September as compared to Flipkart's Big Billion day jackpot of Rs 5,000 cr, according to Livemint. (However, ET reports that Flipkart may have sold only Rs 4,300 cr worth of products, a number that is still way ahead of Amazon India's)

Livemint quotes Manish Tiwary, vice president (category management) at Amazon India as saying, “Amazon.in remains the largest marketplace and the fastest growing one in Indian e-commerce landscape. The recently concluded Great Indian Festival has been our biggest shopping event till date with a remarkable spike in customer acquisition from tier-II and tier-III cities across India, with 85% of new customers coming from these areas. We saw a tremendous customer response across categories—from high-value products such as smartphones and appliances to everyday essentials such as shampoos, biscuits and pet supplies.”

Honor 8 Pro with 6GB RAM, dual cameras launched in India at Rs 29,999

TECHNOLOGY NEWS - Honor, a China-based smartphone brand backed by electronics major Huawei, has just launched the Honor 8 Pro with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage for Rs 29,999 exclusively on Amazon India. 

P Sanjeev, vice-president (sales), Huawei India-Consumer Business Group, said, "Honor is committed to scale new heights of product innovation and customer centricity through its products. We are focused on embedding powerful features in our devices at an affordable price to accommodate consumers' lifestyle. With the Honor 8 Pro, we set out to push the boundaries on all fronts. The Honor 8 Pro offers market-leading specifications by pushing the boundary of smartphone design, providing 2K display, extra-long battery life, dual camera setup and delivering powerful performance to ensure best experiences across the scenarios that today’s smartphone users care most about. Honor can do this like no other due to its unique e-commerce business model and world-class R&D capabilities."

The successor of the Honor 8, the Honor 8 Pro features dual rear cameras of 12-megapixel each. The dual rear cameras utilise one colour sensor and one black and white sensor. The monochrome lens captures a black-and-white image with depth of detail and the RGB colour lens ensures vivid colour reproduction. Both the cameras work in tandem to capture clearer, brighter, and vivid photographs.

The device also supports 4K video recording without eating internal storage thanks to the efficient H.265 codec that reduces the video's size to a great extent. Huawei also offers dedicated features that are co-developed with Go Pro, which helps in organising photos by category and automatically generates video stories that are easily customisable.

In terms of design and specification, the Honor 8 Pro is on par with flagship smartphones. The device sports a metallic build, a 79 per cent screen-to-body ratio, and has a 6.97-mm slim profile. The smartphone sports a 5.7-inch 2K screen that offers a high contrast ratio of 1500:1. The Honor 8 Pro utilises Huawei’s Kirin 960 octa-core processor, which is manufactured on a 16nm processing unit. The smartphone features a microSD card slot that allows memory expansion up to 256 GB.

Behave yourself Amazon, Shaktikanta Das lashes out at the e-com giant

Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das today asked Amazon to desist from being flippant about Indian symbols and icons, cautioning it that "indifference will be at your own peril".

"Amazon, better behave. Desist from being flippant about Indian symbols & icons. Indifference will be at your own peril," Das said in a tweet.

In another tweet however he added: "Comment on Amazon was as a citizen of India as I felt strongly about it. Nothing more should be read into it."

Last week, after a strong protest by India over Amazon selling doormats depicting Indian flag, the e-retail giant removed the offensive article from its Canadian website.

A spokesman for Amazon based at its headquarters in Seattle had told The Washington Post that the doormat was no longer for sale on its website.

After the Indian flag incident, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had received several complaints of Amazon selling flip-flops with Mahatma Gandhi's image.(Read More)

Step-by-step guide: How to sell your old/new goods on Amazon

Special Weekend News - Are you tired of stacking old gadgets, books, magazines, et al? E-commerce giant Amazon India has started a pilot programme in Bangalore that allows people to sell their old products. 

In an attempt to mobilise its user base and to encourage peer-to-peer (P2P) sales, Amazon has launched a programme called 'pick-pack-and-pay.

'The company has integrated its P2P selling platform Junglee with its own horizontal marketplace to allow individuals to sell new and used items online' reports Business Standard.

The landing page for registration as an individual seller will be on Junglee

“We piloted this experience through Junglee, which allowed us to learn and improve. We are now making it available to even more customers through Amazon.in. Customers can get this experience now through either site,” said a company spokesperson.( Read More)

Amazon India taps individual sellers to grow user base

Breaking News - Amazon is looking to mobilise its massive user base to carve itself a space in India's online peer-to-peer (p2p) selling space and take on homegrown rivals Olx and Quikr.

The company has integrated its peer-to-peer selling platform Junglee with its own horizontal marketplace to allow individuals to sell new and used items online. Amazon has launched the service in Bengaluru and has begun promoting its 'Sell as Individual' service to its users.

Amazon began piloting Junglee's end-to-end service in Bengaluru in August, promising user the convenience of handling pickups, packaging, delivery and payments. The company will charge a fee of Rs 10 for processing orders below Rs 1,000, Rs 50 for orders between Rs 1,000 and Rs 5,000 and Rs 100 for orders above Rs 5,000.

The jump into peer-to-peer selling will give Amazon customers a choice of both new and used products, while sellers will benefit from the company's already large customer base. Further, used products could help to attract more users onto Amazon thus growing its overall user base, in the hope to match rival Flipkart's 100 million claimed users.(Read More)