Look for a launch announcement by Amazon this week or next of a new web service around payments, adding to their S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual server) and other services. They’ve been quietly testing the service, which will compete with PayPal and Google Checkout, for a few weeks. It is an extension of the existing Amazon Payments, which allows third parties selling items on Amazon’s extended network to receive payments from buyers.
We hear that for now at least this is a redirect service only, like Google Checkout. Users will be redirected to Amazon’s servers to complete the payment and then returned to the original site. PayPal also offers an integrated solution that allows users to remain on the original ecommerce site, an attractive feature for larger partners. The service will also allow sites to use Amazon to manage payments between users, and receive confirmation of transactions. This will be particularly useful for the new crop of online money management services.
PayPal, owned by eBay, still dominates this space, and the spats between them and Google are becoming legendary.
Thanks from this information!
Marcelo
@bdb: Sure there are many companies offering credit card based services (Obopay, ePassporte, 3V,…).
I simply believe that offering this kind of functionality will be the key to universal acceptance of Internet payment services. Not offering such functionality substantially reduces an IPS’ merchant coverage (and therefore it’s value for consumers) - as seen with Google Checkout.
I agree that Amazon has a better fit with a payment service offering. Google’s offering not only fell short of matching PayPal and didn’t even really fill a pressing need for merchants. I think the rationale on Google’s side was that at the time PayPal’s offering was fairly limited to ebay, person to person, etc. and less as an additional alternative payment type for merchants. Google saw the opening and hastily threw themselves into the game trying to buy share. Ebay CEO Meg Whitman recently gloated over their trouncing of Google Checkout. I don’t think that consumers will want to maintain more than one payment service for general web use and so in this regards PayPal has a great head start. But to date usage has been driven by consumer demand and not by merchant acceptance. I might look for this to change as Amazons rates are better than PayPal’s for small dollar ACH tickets.