Why can we add only 10k rupees to our Amazon Pay balance per month? Why can’t we add more?*
Apparently, you can add up to INR 1L to your Amazon Pay wallet account if you complete KYC.
At least that’s what I learned from the email I received from Amazon.
I had no interest in adding any money to my Amazon Pay but I decided to go ahead with the KYC, just in case…
PSA: PayTM recently restarted levying ~2% surcharge for wallet topups via credit card. Like me, if you're not fond of incurring extra cost for paying with credit card, try Amazon Pay. #NoSurcharge.
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) April 8, 2021
The Amazon Pay KYC is an omnichannel journey that starts on the mobile channel and ends with a physical visit of an Amazon agent.
I uploaded my ID and Address Proof artefacts in my Amazon app. It was fairly frictionless. At the end of the process, the app told me to book an appointment for the physical visit of the Amazon agent to the address stated in the Address Proof artefact that I’d uploaded. I booked the appointment for a few days later.
From there, things went downhill.
A few hours before the appointed time of visit, I got an email from Amazon unilaterally rescheduling the appointment to a few days later. I didn’t like it but I let it pass.
On the revised appointment date, nobody turned up, and neither did I get a call or email to cancel the appointment.
My Amazon Pay KYC is in a state of limbo.
But I couldn’t care less. As I said earlier, I’d no interest in doing this KYC in the first place. So, until Amazon takes the next step, I’m going to sit tight.
I’m wary of fully-digital KYC journeys because they do Brute Force Digitalization and have excessive friction. I’ve had a great experience of PayTM’s Omnichannel KYC.
When it comes to Aadhaar-linkage, PayTM requires physical visit, banks don't. Many people find PayTM's customer journey more frictionless than banks'. Further proof that a well thought-out omnichannel approach can deliver better CX than brute-force digitalization of everything.
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) March 31, 2018
I was happy to note that Amazon Pay followed an omnichannel KYC journey à la PayTM.
However, apart from that, Amazon Pay has fallen considerably short of the PayTM KYC experience.
*: This is the original question I answered. I’m repeating it to help me make sense of my answer in case it’s moved to / merged with some other question that I didn’t answer.