Mobile Apps Can Now Put a “Pay with Amazon” Button Option

Amazon is finally taking its huge number customers seriously and planning to leverage them to slowly enter the payment landscape.

Recently, Amazon has confirmed the introduction of “Pay with Amazon” buttons on mobile apps

While the rumors of Amazon being serious about the payment business have been floating around for a while, this time around, the announcement about “Pay with Amazon” certainly put things in different perspective.

Besides allowing purchasing outside Amazon in mobile apps, the Pay with Amazon buttons are now showing up in various international markets on websites as well.

The move came around nine months after former PayPal’s General Manager of Emerging Retail Services, Patrick Gauthier joined Amazon as the Vice President of External Payments.

Yes, Amazon now has a department called “External Payments,” it seems. Mr. Gauthier was given the responsibility of building a payment business that included both web and mobile interfaces.

Industry analysts closed to the company said that if Amazon finally gets serious about processing external payments, it can easily become a close competitor to the grandfather of the digital payment industry, PayPal.

Earlier last week, in an interview, Mr. Gauthier pointed out that currently around 46% of all goods sold on Amazon are from third party merchants. So, in essence, Amazon is already facilitating payments for third party merchants on the Amazon Marketplace.

Hence, offering to process payments outside of Amazon would undercut its Marketplace merchants, in a way.

Talking to re/code, Gauthier asked “What do you think would happen to that business the instant we became even within a mile of breaching the trust of those merchants?”

He went on to claim that merchants that offer Pay with Amazon option have a better chance of seeing their visitors making the purchase. Amazon also found that offering Amazon payment option also helps merchants gain repeat buyers from their outlets.