Part of Amazon’s success is attributable to the ease it has brought to the payments experience. Shopping on Amazon.com is made simple by Amazon storing much of a customer’s checkout information and minimising clicks, and a few years ago Amazon rolled out Checkout, which lets users on other websites pay using their Amazon credits or payments information stored on Amazon. (Amazon doesn’t reveal Checkout has been successful.)
Now Amazon has released a Mobile Payments Service. The programme will let e-commerce sites integrate the Checkout experience into sites designed for mobile phones, presenting yet another option for developers who are eager to encourage more mobile-commerce.
Amazon is entering a crowded and unproven market here. Google, PayPal and a slew of startups offer similar solutions. And by competing with PayPal’s Mobile Checkout, the service opens another front in Amazon’s war with Ebay, which owns PayPal.
Mobile commerce, however, is still in its infancy. Consumers still seem reluctant to make purchases from their phones, preferring to wait until they are back in front of their computer to check out.
People are at least getting used to buying one thing on their phones — apps. Indeed, Amazon can’t have missed last week’s news that more more than 2bn apps have now been downloaded from iTunes.
Now Amazon is betting that their painless, brand name payment system will make mobile commerce even more mainstream. All the better if it can take some wind from the sails of Ebay and Google at the same time.
