Amazon Pay Places Translates Amazon Shopping Information into Real-World Shopping

You’ve got to give Amazon credit for rolling out new solutions. Recently, the company brought out a whole new way for users to pay bills just about anywhere, using their Amazon payment information. It’s called Amazon Pay Places, and it’s a notion that’s about to start expanding fairly soon. The question, however, is if it should.

Amazon Pay Places is a fairly limited-scope operation right now, limited mainly to TGI Friday’s locations. That’s slated to expand, of course, but right now it’s rather narrow in operational scope. It’s also limited in locations that can use it, currently active only in a handful of cities including Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, Wilkes-Barre and Washington, D.C.

As for how it works, it’s fairly simple: start with the Amazon mobile app, and then turn to the drop-down menu and find “Programs and Features” in app navigation. In this section, in those markets where it actually works, Amazon Pay Places will be ready to go and displayed accordingly.

It’s being cited as an excellent convenience tool for pick-up orders, and the farther this expands the better it’s likely to do. However, Amazon Pay Places isn’t just going to be a restaurant tools, and may go out even farther. It’s actually being brought out as part of Amazon Pay, which represents a lower cost per transaction and makes it more likely to be brought into users’ folds.

It would almost be like making every brick-and-mortar shop out there an Amazon store, a point which might be welcome for beleaguered brick-and-mortars frantically looking for ways to compete with Amazon. Of course, it’s too narrow in scope to have any real impact in the market right now—if you’re not going to a TGI Friday’s on the East Coast, you can pretty much forget about seeing this option anywhere—but as it expands, it could prove valuable.

Right now, Amazon Pay Places will have virtually zero impact in the wider market because for the most part it’s just not there. If it gains ground in terms of acceptance, then we’ll see how much value this has. Being able to compile all your purchases under your Amazon information could be worthwhile, but considering how many options are there already, this smacks of Amazon solving the wrong problem.