Amazon Sets Stage to Take on PayPal With Expanded Payment Options
Retailers offering their own payment systems isn’t exactly new, but it is a fairly bright idea, allowing companies to offer the convenience of a payment system without the expense of a middleman.
Amazon has recently been spotted putting a lot more into its own payments options, and reports suggest it may be in a position to take on PayPal before much longer.
The program, called Pay With Amazon, gives the current roster of 304 million account holders the ability to shop not just with Amazon, but with other merchants outside of Amazon besides.
Users need only sign in with an Amazon account on the sites that accept Pay with Amazon, and then, users can use the currently-registered credit cards and shipping details just as if said details had been manually entered on other sites.
Merchants accepting Pay with Amazon, so far, include Southwest Airlines and the GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi service. Retailers connected with Shopify can also get in on the action, at last report.
Amazon has one major problem in terms of drawing interested retailers; many retailers are competitors with Amazon, and as such, may not have an interest in offering up data for the retail juggernaut to put to use.
There’s a clear advantage in convenience, but that advantage may be counterbalanced by the data that may be used to cancel out other competitive advantages.
Given that over 23 million Amazon customers so far have put Pay with Amazon to work with non-Amazon merchants, and just over the last two years, this may be a moot point.
Customers may want access to the service too much for businesses to refuse; a business that won’t give the customer base what it wants is likely to lose that customer base.
Pay with Amazon might be a welcome addition to the lineup here, and give users a way to tap into a new customer base that wants the convenience and perceived safety of working with Amazon.
While sellers may not be interested in opening up data stores to Amazon’s voracious maw, the interested customers might be too many to pass up.
For those businesses that sell what Amazon doesn’t, meanwhile, the opportunity is too clear-cut to pass up.