Amazon Releases Beta Version of Mobile Wallet

Amazon has very quietly released the beta version of it’s mobile wallet application, fittingly named, “Amazon Wallet.”

The new mobile wallet made its debut on Amazon Appstore, Google Play and will be an app on the recently released Amazon Fire Phone. Wallet appeared in both App stores, without fanfare, on July 17.

In its current stage, the Amazon App has very limited functionality. Now, according to the app’s description, you can either type or scan in membership information as well as gift and loyalty card numbers. This will allow you to “reduce the clutter in your leather purse or wallet.” The cards then become available in digital format as a barcode, QR code, text or image.

On the web version, at www.amazon.com/wallet, users can link credit and debit cards as well as their checking accounts. These can then be used to shop on Amazon or on other vendor websites that have enabled a “Pay With Amazon” button.

The Amazon Wallet is seen as the entry point, for Amazon, into the field of electronic payments. Amazon is thought to be planning to use its Kindle reader as a merchant point-of-sale device to compete with Square and to be taking aim at on-line payment giants PayPal and Google Wallet.

While there is speculation, Amazon has remained vague about the future plans for its new product. It is not known when it is planning to move past beta, when a full version will be available and what such a full version would look like. It is also not known if there are plans for the release of an iOS version.

For the moment, Amazon will only say, “in addition to being pre-installed on Fire Phone, we are offering a beta version of the Amazon Wallet app for Android phones in the Amazon Appstore and on Google Play. We look forward to getting customer feedback on the beta app.”