Amazon launch 3 payment services

July 29, 2008

Amazon have today launched Amazon Payments to enable sellers to accept payments from buyers using their Amazon log on credentials.

Amazon Flexible Payments actually launched in limited beta back in August 2007 and Amazon have rolled this in with their new product offerings which are Amazon Simple Pay and Checkout by Amazon.

Checkout by Amazon allows buyers to pay with their Amazon log on, but the seller has to check their Seller Central account to verify payment has been completed. It enables buyer to use Amazon’s patented one click checkout to complete their purchase and provides sellers with tools such as shipping calculators, tax rates and custom promotions for customers.

Amazon Simple Pay is a cut down payments system which redirects buyers to the Amazon Payments website to complete the transaction. There are simply cut and paste HTML code to enable sellers to get up and running quickly and easily but without the additional features of Checkout by Amazon.

Fees for both Simple pay and Checkout vary between 2.5% - 1.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, but payments under $10.00 incur a rate of 5% plus $0.05.

Flexible Payment Services which is now out of beta is designed for web developers for full integration using Amazon API calls.

It will be interesting to see how many merchants start offering Amazon Payments, there’s still time to add it to ecommerce sites before the Christmas selling season begins. At this point Amazon payments appears to be limited to the US. Although Amazon have been unable to comment at the time of writing, I’d expect it to roll out for the UK at some point in the future.

So will you be adding Amazon payments to your own website? Do you mind Amazon gaining access to your sales data which they undoubtedly would? One thing is certain - the more payment options that you can offer a buyer the less likely they are to abandon a shopping cart at checkout and more than 80 million potential customers already have Amazon account.

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Paypal | 8 Comments