06.12.2015 14:34
Amazon says it is finally ready to turn its huge customer base into a big payments business outside of Amazon. For real this time.
The e-commerce giant is bringing its "Pay with Amazon" buttons to mobile apps, while "tripling down" on placing its Pay with Amazon buttons on websites in overseas markets like Japan. The moves are the latest in the company's on-again, off-again efforts to take advantage of the more than 200 million customer accounts it has on file by processing payments on websites outside of its own walls.
Earlier this year, Amazon hired PayPal vet Patrick Gauthier to lead a newly created team dedicated solely to building a payments business across the Web and app world. The payments industry is watching closely. For years, it has been waiting for Amazon to become a real player, perhaps challenging PayPal along the way.
But the initiative has moved in fits and starts — a digital wallet project, for example, was killed earlier this year before it even exited beta testing. And the same line of questioning has hung over Amazon's payments efforts at each turn: How many online shops will really want to get in bed with Amazon, which sells everything under the sun, and let it get a view into their transactions?
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Amazon has long downplayed this critique, telling Re/code last year that there's a barrier between the external payments business and the rest of the company, and that Amazon only sees transaction totals, not the specific items in each order. The company has also said there are plenty of transaction types that aren't competitive with Amazon; one of its most well-known payment clients in the U.S. is GoGo, the Internet provider on commercial flights.
Amazon's new head of external payments, Gauthier, reiterated this defense in an interview earlier this week, saying the worst label an Amazon project can carry is "trust-buster." He also pointed to the growth of the Amazon Marketplace, where outside merchants sell their goods competing against Amazon itself, as an example of Amazon doing good by other merchants. The third-party marketplace now accounts for 46 percent of all goods sold on Amazon.
"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 asked rhetorically.
[ https://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/29/amazon-launches-pay-with-amazon-buttons-for-mobile-apps.html ]
