(26 July 2017 – United States) Amazon has introducing a new feature called Amazon Pay Places, that allows customers to pay for in-store and order ahead shopping experiences using their Amazon app.
The new feature aims to replace cash, check, credit and debit while shopping in person. The e-commerce giant has partnered with American restaurant chain, TGI Fridays, however will be rolled out in more in-store and physical world applications in the future. The retailer has not revealed when that may happen, or which merchants will be added, or what geographies it will extend to.
Currently, only Amazon customers in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Richmond, Virginia, and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania are able to take advantage of the feature.
Though Amazon Pay is generally associated with e-commerce, Amazon has been slowly rolling it out to the real world, as well. For instance, Amazon last year partnered with luxury clothing merchant Moda Operandi, allowing in-store customers to pay for clothes they previously selected online using their Amazon account information.
Amazon Pay Places is the second use case for the company’s payment system, Amazon Pay. The first being an online gateway for payments. Although Amazon does not disclose merchant numbers, in February, it announced that over 33 million customers have used Amazon Payments to make a purchase – up 10 million from April 2016.