Amazon is outsourcing more of its Web-scale software. Yesterday, it beefed up its payment services with the launch of Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay. Other e-commerce sites can basically insert an Amazon Checkout cart on their sites and Amazon’s software will handle one-click ordering for anyone with an existing amazon account, order management, shipping and sales tax calculations, and other features. Or with Amazon Simple Pay, customers can just remotely sign into their Amazon accounts and Amazon will handle the payment process itself.
For both services, Amazon charges a transaction fee that starts at 2.9 percent of the order amount, plus 30 cents per order (it goes down to 1.9 percent for sites doing more than $100,000 a month in sales). And for transactions less than $10, Amazon charges 5 percent plus 5 cents.
Amazon already offers an array of payment services for both consumers and businesses, including a Flexible Payments Web service for developers to build their own checkout experiences for themselves. Hints of these latest additions came out in June. Checkout and Simple Pay are aimed squarely at businesses who may not have the resources or time to build their own payment service using Amazon’s Flexible Payment Services API. Amazon is going after PayPal and Google Checkout by leveraging its own payment software (and the millions of existing accounts tied to its system) and making it available to others.
Amazon is making big strides towards building cloud computing services, from payments to storage to compute cycles. If it can succeed in creating meaningful revenues from these services, they should be higher-margin businesses than shipping books and CDs. (In a related move today, Amazon is simplifying its Mechanical Turk Web service so that non-coders (i.e., business managers) can set up tasks they want to automatically farm out to digital workers across the world.
From the headline I first thought that Amazon would truly outsource their shopping cart as in contracting the service out to another company which didn’t make sense to me given their strategy of becoming a platform where other can outsource their web systems to. But the article makes sense. This wil further reduce the hurdle of going into an online business for small businesses and startups. Is Amazon’s one-click patent still in place and valid? I’ve heard that some guy fought it an won?
Great to see competition develop in the ‘alternative’ checkout space. Hopefully Amazon can gain some traction with consumers and merchants and become as ubiquitous as Paypal and Google.
Good luck
You might want to get a dictionary and look up “outsourcing”. Just a thought.
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
out·source
–verb (used with object)
1. (of a company or organization) to purchase (goods) or subcontract (services) from an outside supplier or source.
2. to contract out (jobs, services, etc.): a small business that outsources bookkeeping to an accounting firm.
I’m with Peter on this one, the title suggested that they were using a 3rd party to run their Check Out. I had to read the first paragraph 2 or 3 times to understand exactly what was going on.
Hey it’s a blog, what do you expect?
Amazon Outsources Its Checkout Cart is a much more attention getting headline than something like “Amazon Makes Its Checkout Cart Available to Third Parties”. And who doesn’t want attention? Certainly not bloggers!
hint: amazon payment and mechanical turk services are (yet?) available only to US customers.
This is clearly an attempt to redefine the term “Outsource”. Expect a techcrunch trademark application within the week.
The title makes it look like link bait. Keep it classy TC.
yes a shame that you need to be a US based merchant to use this…
I’m interested in security steps amazon will take with this. Will we see random image and challenge questions to help reassure people they are actually using the amazon service and not a fake one?
I think phishing schemes might rise a bit more as people get use to a third-party Web site link up with amazon.
http://www.iglueit.com
Erick,
Maybe you should ‘outsource’ your writing, because you seem to s*ck at it.
If you tell him to outsource his writing, he will just change his on screen name.
“Amazon Offers Shopping Cart to Any Site” might have been easier to understand. Erick’s headline gave me a double-take.
yahoo! and amazon… would that compete with google and keep share holders happy?
sorry to repeat, but yes, the title is totally misleading. As to the offering itself, it’s great to have more competition to Paypal (Google Checkout never really succeeded and Google’s losing tons of money on it). With Amazon’s 80M customers, this can be one heck of a useful service for smaller merchants.
I wouldn’t give amazon a cut for this, unless my merchandise also appears on their site.
garr, TC commenters, get over it!
I’m glad to see some real competition here. This is the only way we’ll see the prices of these services finally start to become reasonable. Of course, there is some friction–for instance, paypal might do better to drop its price, but since it’s got a monopoly on instant payments for eBay, it is more profitable to gouge us. Ah well.
What’s with the cloud term that keeps popping up? TC–a tutorial?
I agree headline tells a different story, how about:
Amazon Checkout Cart released to third party stores
Who cares about the title? Damn
I think this is a good idea from Amazon, and hopefully I can use it in a few upcoming sites.
Good idea, let’s them work on what they need to for the products on the site.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Would someone take out paypal already. We are all sick of that fraud of a company.
That merchant rates are the same as PayPal. Does it support recurring subscriptions though?
The article below has a much more in depth review of the new shopping cart features and details on the 1 click integration
http://tinyurl.com/AMAZONSHOPPINGCARTREVEALED
Ad Manager, I just updated the article to answer your question about recurring payments
http://tinyurl.com/AMAZONSHOPPINGCARTREVEALED
The transaction fee are way expensive than paypal and google checkout.
As per price the following comes in order:
Google Checkout
Paypal
Amazon
As per users the following come in order:
Paypal (170 million)
Amazon (70 million members)
Google Checkout (??)
Kevin,
Where are you getting your numbers from.
I’m finding number that show different amounts for Amazon and Paypal.
Fee wise the system seem to be on par from what I can see if you look at the charts on the respective websites.
Terrible title. Better luck next time.
They have the best product. Glad to see them put the heat on Paypal. Hopefully they can arrange the system for international currency ~ and end around paypal’s dominance of eBay.
Limits $ transfers to only $2k/mth. No good. Now they are a bank working a “carry trade”.
I’m surprised no one has pointed out yet that the author has confused the meaning of “outsource”.
Title changed. You are all such nitpickers.
Funny that so many people complained about the misuse of “outsourcing”, but good suggestions were lacking. I’m not even sure there is a perfect term for this. Anyone?
My personal suggestion would be “Amazon _syndicates_ its shopping cart” — although that is typically used for content…
Amazon continues to vertically integrate and suck more and more buyer/Seller data into its platform.
If merchants are looking for international checkout and Shipping they should look at Shipwire.com
Works with Google Checkout, PayPal Cart and Amazon Seller Central
Close with any of these “checkouts” and the order gets sent to Shipwire who will automate order fulfillment from warehouses in Los Angeles, Chicago, Reno, Vancouver, Toronto and/or UK.
Free trial allows you to plug all these solutions in and send 6 orders from any of our warehouses.
http://www.shipwire.com/trial
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