Amazon have launched what looks like a direct competitor to PayPal – Login and Pay with Amazon. Sadly it’s only currently available in the US with no expectation that it’ll come to the UK any time soon.
The new Login and Pay with Amazon services aims to make it easy to accept payments on your website with customers simply using their Amazon credentials to pay.
Companies encourage their customers to create an online account in order to offer a personalized buying experience but quite frankly it’s a pain point to open an account every time you want to purchase from a new retailer for the first time. Although often a guest checkout will be available that’s not always the case and opening a new account creates unnecessary friction at the time of a first purchase.
Login and Pay with Amazon can replace guest checkouts not only making payments quicker and easier, but also enabling retailers to offer improved services which could include: managing and tracking orders, purchase history detail, special discounts, instant access to shipping addresses and payment methods – all the bits that Gareth from Metapack talked about in his post on Tamebay today.
Of course all of this can be done with PayPal and my real question was surely Amazon already have Checkout by Amazon so what’s the difference.
Login and Pay with Amazon vs Checkout by Amazon
Login with Amazon is an elaboration of Checkout by Amazon, in that they remove the shopping cart and order management functionality from CBA to leave just the Payment processing. Then they bolt on the Login with Amazon functionality to enrich the total experience for the Buyer.
Checkout by Amazon is a simply matter of adding some simple copy-and-paste HTML to display the Checkout by Amazon button on your website.
Login and Pay with Amazon is a flexible API-level integration, so more complex to implement but more powerful. As soon as customers Login with Amazon, you get the customer’s name, email address and postcode enabling you to create an account for them in the background and letting them get on with the shopping part of the transaction.
This is especially valuable for easy for mobile customers – there’s nothing worse than trying to tap in your name and delivery address but Login and Pay with Amazon enables customers log in then pay in just a few taps with widgets that automatically adapt to tablets and smartphones.
There are more than active Amazon customer accounts worldwide. The big question is would you use it as a retailer and would you prefer it as a consumer to tapping in your address details when buying from a new retailer?
