UK webstore owners have a new payment option to offer to their customers. Checkout by Amazon has now launched in the UK. Retailers can sign up to offer shoppers payment with their Amazon log on credentials by signing up at Amazon Payments.
There are very few payment methods I recommend to retailers, PayPal is an obvious choice and it’s essential that all websites accept direct card payments. For those without a merchant account this can also be handled with your PayPal account with PayPal Website Payments Pro.
Many of the alternative solutions have yet to attract widespread adoption from consumers. Even with the resources of Google behind it Google Checkout has yet to become widely used when other choices are offered.
Checkout by Amazon however has the potential to be huge for retailers. With the number of customers already purchasing on Amazon to be able to pay as easily as with a PayPal account is an attractive option. For many customers paying with either PayPal or Amazon adds reassurance that they don’t have to expose their debit or credit card details to a company they may never have heard of before.
There are already a few companies offering Checkout by Amazon including The Watch Hut.
Fees for using Checkout by Amazon are comparable to PayPal with a 20p per transaction charge plus a percentage of the transaction value, starting at 3.4% for up to £1500 processed per month. The fees drop in tranches to 20p plus 1.4% for those processing over £55,000 per month.
Will you consider adding Amazon Payments as an option on your website? What would be your reason for offering (or choosing not to offer) Amazon’s checkout offering to your customers as an addition to the payment options you already provide?
13 Responses
Chris,
Immediate reaction is to consider it as being a good thing to offer. Any option/alternative that can make it easier to complete a transaction is a good thing.
I can recall many occasions when browsing at home where I came across something that I wanted to buy – only to find my wallet/cards were elsewhere and so I abandoned the process ( lazy sod, I hear you say, but hey, that’s what happens ). If I could have used my Amazon login with my saved ship-to-address etc. it would have been so easy to complete the purchase.
Once integration is understood I will certainly be looking to implement on our and our client webstores.
Chris,
I hope you will now showcase anyone that offers amazon payments in the way that you showcase domino’s paypal offering ?
Realistically:
I sell on ebay and take paypal, but as a consumer I would never buy from ebay or use paypal.
I buy from amazon, in fact it is my preference, I would trust a site that used amazon payments, I would not trust one that used paypal.
I don’t think i am the only one.
I choose to to pay thousands of pounds of personal spend through amazon, if those shops used paypal they would loose the business.
Interesting.
I tend to only carry cash so if buying online I tend to look for sites offering Paypal, but with our own sites 90% use Sagepay and 10% only use Paypal.
I think we will trial Amazon and see how it goes, I certainly won’t be swapping Amazon for Paypal anytime soon.
Anybody know anything about integration with Magento? The only module I can find requires a US Amazon account. I would be tempted to add this and maybe ditch the temperamental Google Checkout.
Currently accept Sagepay and Paypal and will trial Amazon payments in due course.
It doesn’t integrate with Cubecart and I have not the time or skill to custom integrate so its not for me.
1)Will Amazon be looking at the sales data with a view to retailing popular items, or will there be a “Chinese Wall” between their payments operations and their selling business?
2)Will they use the data to enforce their no lower pricing on website than Amazon policy?