Amazon have announced a new service to help small businesses take payments online.
The catchily titled “Login and Pay with Amazon” is a new payment gateway that enables businesses to take payments from anyone with an Amazon account, and there’s about 100 million of them worldwide. The convenience for the customer combined with the ability to leverage the trust of Amazon makes this a bit of a no-brainer for online stores. There’s already a Magento plugin and it’s only a matter of time before it gets integrated into eCommerce service like Woo Commerce & Shopify.
For the online shopper, trust is a major factor in the buying decision and many prefer to pay more for a product or service rather than give their card details to a cheaper but dodgy looking website. While PayPal is great and fairly well-trusted, it has always felt like the Fisher-Price of online payment systems while millions of people trust Amazon everyday already, so Login and Pay with Amazon instantly provides a level of confidence in the customer.
Of course, Amazon is not without its own trust issues. Repeatedly accused of legally avoiding paying tax by running all sales through Luxemburg while the UK Amazon business is little more than a warehousing firm, Amazon effectively paid around 0.01% tax in the UK on the £3billion profit it made in 2012. With one in five of all books sold coming from Amazon, a new grocery delivery division and much more, they already have a strong hold on UK online commerce and one thing you can’t accuse them of is being careless with money.
The small business owner has the choice of numerous payment systems such as PayPal, the hosted routes like Shopify or even opting for the full-on transaction gateways like SagePay or WorldPay, but since Google has retired Google Checkout there’s a decent sized gap for Amazon to fill. Amazon’s charges are comparable to other payments systems so it’s definitely worth looking at.
“Pay with Amazon” supports handheld & desktop devices and is supposed to be simple to implement. It will be coming to most platforms near you soon.