One of the big advantages PayPal was supposed to gain by spinning off from eBay was that the service would be more attractive to other businesses. Obviously the biggest coup would be to appear on Amazon.
That’s not likely to happen according to a report by CNET who quote Amazon Payments VP Patrick Gauthier as saying “It’s quite simple, Amazon starts with the customer. If our customers were asking for it [PayPal], it would have been on Amazon already“.
It’s worth noting that Patrick Gauthier used to work for PayPal and since jumped ship to Amazon, but for him at least he’s slamming the door on his old colleagues. He went on to question why Amazon would want to make the Amazon checkout experience “more complicated”.
Even a choice of PayPal instead of Amazon means a customer has to think and decide which payment service to use, but worse, although logging in with PayPal is simply a user name/password, if you’re buying on Amazon you’re already logged in so why would Amazon want you to log in a second time?
Amazon do have another reason for forcing their customers to use Amazon’s own checkout – it means that they have your payment details. Amazon launched their Pay with Amazon service in 2013 and even if you haven’t used it yet, or if you’re a merchant and haven’t added it to your website, Amazon hope that you will in the future.
5 Responses
Their logic is sound, since Amazon is trying to slowly independently take entire control and not relinquish that to someone else.
That being said, their checkout is one of the worst I’ve seen across hundreds of websites. New buyers often get caught out as it does not display postage clearly at any point (as the buy box is not always correct after factoring in your address).
I don’t know if it’s an intentional choice to mislead customers that way (maybe they feel it’s better to get the sale and sometimes a customer doesn’t notice it costs more to send it where they live or just accepti t?), but I feel for a company so ‘customer focused’ a clear checkout would do wonders.
>if you’re buying on Amazon you’re already logged in so why would Amazon want you to log in a second time?
Amazon usually makes me log in again when I go to the checkout stage or if I want to view my order history.
I love Amazon, you don’t need any of the tricks and street awareness that you need for eBay, you buy pay, and get. If it doesn’t arrive, work, goes wrong, or you don’t like it – you send it back for a refund. If that’s the business model where does Paypal fit in?
Just one thing to say here…. Sometimes customers actually like choice. If deciding between paying via Amazon or paypal is such a big headache then how the hell did they ever chose what to buy in the first place..!!! Such a lame excuse for hiding the fact they want everything to be controlled by them, hmmm bit like Apple. How long before they have a strangle hold and start fleecing people because they can?