Amazon barges into mobile payments ring

By

$1 trillion
Pay with Amazon buttons have plenty of ammo given the over 200 million Amazon accounts.
Photo: Roberto Baldwin/The Next Web

Amazon will start taking more advantage of the millions of credit cards it has on file with new “Pay with Amazon” buttons. The expansion to Amazon Payments will allow third-party developers to include these buttons in their mobile apps and have users quickly sign in to process payments. Since all their payment information is already with Amazon, checkout processes should be much speedier without having to reenter everything. It looks like Apple Pay and PayPal need to watch out.

Paying with Amazon already existed, but not for mobile developers. If you’ve ever backed a project on Kickstarter, you might remember having to log in with Amazon to make the payment up until Kickstarter switched to Stripe at the beginning of the year. Now that Pay with Amazon buttons could start popping up on checkout pages everywhere, Amazon is a more credible threat to Apple Pay and PayPal — both of which Amazon has never supported for payments on its own website.

Coincidentally, Amazon hired Patrick Gauthier of PayPal earlier in the year to take the lead on new payments projects. He told Re/code that the company found more people tend to go through with purchases when they use Amazon Payments because it’s quicker. Businesses that incorporate the service should expect to notice the same trend, rather than having customers add products to their carts and neglect to place the orders.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Developers could choose Pay with Amazon over Apple Pay or PayPal in their apps or perhaps give users multiple options. With over 200 million accounts, Amazon makes a solid a case for itself.

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