Amazon Leverages Its 215 Million Cards on File to Take on PayPal
Amazon put PayPal in its crosshairs with the announcement today of “Pay with Amazon,” a service that allows users of participating sites to fill in their Amazon payment and shipping info with the click of a button. Another click completes the purchase.
Also presented was “Login with Amazon,” which allows users to log onto sites using their Amazon credentials. This product has been in the wild, but not in wide release.
Amazon made the announcement at the Money2020 event in Las Vegas.
Amazon Vice President of Seller Services Tom Taylor revealed that Amazon has 215 million active users of its service on file, and has payment and shipping information for them all. Further, the brand was ranked the most trusted in the world by multiple consumer surveys.
The Seattle-based seller of, well, everything, has been a quietly growing presence in the financial services space for some time. Amazon Web Services offers hosting to several banks, including the National Bank of Australia and Washington Trust Bank, not to mention a number of nonbank financial service providers, such as Stripe.
Amazon has made tentative steps into this area before, particularly with its login information. Facebook and Google both appear on many sites as login options, but neither has the cards on file that Amazon has to drive payments. Amazon has made tentative steps toward offering offsite payments with products such as Amazon Checkout, but the current effort appears to be broader. The partner for this effort is inflight internet provider Gogo, which co-presented with Amazon at Money2020.
Taylor spoke quietly and almost apologetically, saying that at Amazon employees are more accustomed to writing than speaking. The representatives at the company’s booth were similarly low-key and unsalesman-like. Asked about possible connections between Payments and AWS, one employee replied, “Yeah, we have all these different things, and I guess we haven’t done a good job telling people about them. But, yeah, maybe we could link all those up someday.”
With a checkout product like Pay with Amazon, there seems little doubt that Amazon is aiming to take on PayPal and Venmo Touch, now also owned by PayPal. Amazon far exceeds PayPal in trust, but USA Today points out that retailers universally see Amazon as a direct competitor, and so might not be keen to share data with it just yet. But Amazon’s payments and shipping are best-in-class, and its mobile experience is extremely smooth. Game on.
