Google Pay now allows you to find nearby essential stores; here’s how

Here's how you can get to know which store is open near you via the Google Pay app.

Google has added number of new options in Google Pay app to make life easy for users while they maintaining social distancing. One of these new features include Nearby Stores, in which users can see which essential shops including medical clinics are open in their vicinity.

The new Nearby Stores feature is now available in 35 cities across India. With the help of this feature, merchants can also indicate their business hours and other details if the social distancing measures are being initiated at the store or not and if essential goods are in stock or not.

The cities which currently have access to the new Nearby Stores feature are: Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy, Secunderabad, Bengaluru, Mysuru, Mumbai, Nagpur, Navi Mumbai, Pimpri-Chinchwad, New Delhi, Gurugram, Faridabad, Chennai, Surat, Ahmedabad, Patna, Varanasi, Lucknow, Ghaziabad, Prayag Raj, Kanpur, Noida, Greater Noida, Visakhapatnam, Indore, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Ludhiana, Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar, Chandigarh, Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Ernakulam.

Here’s how you can use the new Nearby Stores feature on Google Pay:

* Download and install Google Pay app on your smartphone from the Google Play Store.

* Setup the app by entering your phone number and verify with an OTP.

* This will take you to a new page that will be populated with all the stores that are open near you.

* You can select the type of goods you want to narrow down the list.

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* If you press Healthcare, it will bring up a list of all healthcare stores near you.

* In the store listings you can see when someone shopped at the store last and can also press the ‘Get Directions’ button, to open up Google Maps and provide you with the directions to the store.

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* To make changes to their listing or to list their store, business owners will have to do so from the Google Pay for Businesses app.

Apart from this, the company also allows users to book their cooking gas cylinders, pay for their mobile bills, pay their electricity bills and more directly from the app.