Amazon Payments Explodes on the Scene, Doubles 2016 Payment Volume

Looking back at the year 2016—which isn’t out of line for early 2017—revealed some exciting news about Amazon Payments.

Not only was the overall subscriber count up, but so too was the payment volume. That means not only are there more shoppers in play, but they’re buying more too, and that means big business for Amazon Payments.

The numbers tell the story well here; Amazon found over 33 million customers using Amazon Payments, a figure that’s up 10 million from just April of last year. That’s an extra 10 million customers in less than a year, a number that’s positively staggering.

Moreover, while Amazon didn’t provide any numbers on the payments front, it did say that payment volume was almost double what it was in 2016. One of the biggest contributors to that growth was the impressive figures from Cyber Monday, which proved to be a great day for Amazon.

Additionally, Amazon opened up a slew of new markets last year as well. It added several new platforms, including Shopify and Future Shop, and also added markets by geography from France to Italy to Spain. It even brought in new classes of business from insurance to entertainment to not-for-profit operations.

It’s also worth noting that Amazon Payments and Amazon Prime are closely connected; while using Amazon Payments isn’t a condition of using Amazon Prime, it turns out that most Prime users are Payments users. Plus, right around a third—just over 32 percent—of transactions were conducted on a mobile device.

We’ve all seen how impressive the online superstore’s array of products are; just about anything can be had on Amazon one way or another, and increasingly, we’re filling our houses with the proceeds. Whether we’re turning to Amazon’s payment system or not, the value is still afoot. Amazon, however, is likely happy to run a good chunk of its own payment processing systems, which is likely taking an expense out of its own systems and keeping more cash therein.

Still, it’s clear that there’s more mobile shopping, more use of Amazon, and more use of mobile payments in connection with Amazon. That’s good news for Amazon, though maybe not so much for its huge array of competitors who were hoping it’d lose a bit of ground.