PayPal and its parent eBay have been putting the pieces in place to dominate payments in online, mobile and physical environments, but Amazon is determined to give them a run for their money.
The retail giant has introduced a new one-click feature for third party online sellers outside of Amazon.com. They can install ‘Login and Pay with Amazon’ buttons on their checkout pages on PC or mobile sites, through a set of widgets and APIs built by Amazon. This is directly comparable to PayPal’s well-established mechanisms.
The move is logical for Amazon, harnessing its online retail dominance and its cloud infrastructure capabilities. For partners, it links them to Amazon’s customer base and simplifies their customers’ payments, while the web giant gains transaction fees and additional data for its complex customer profiling systems. Its scale of charges is similar to PayPal’s, at 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, with fraud protection bundled in.
Amazon is also stepping up its quest to establish its Kindle developer platform and app store as the premier Android resource, even ahead of Google’s own, and so drive purchases of its tablets and associated content. It has announced a system to offer credit, in the form of its own Amazon Coins virtual currency, when users buy apps from its new Appstore Developer Select program.
This program asks developers to build their apps specifically for the Kindle Fire in return for the retailer promoting their wares and featuring them in a special section of its store to increase their visibility to consumers.
Amazon’s store has roughly 100,000 apps, compared to 375,000 for the iPad alone. Better discoverability can be as attractive to developers as higher fees – ‘We’ve heard from a lot of developers that are not getting discovered, not only in our app store but any app stores really,” Appstore Director Aaron Rubenson said.