Amazon Debuts Honor System For Payments

from the you-have-to-do-what-now? dept

As Amazon tries to expand into other areas to make money, they're coming up with some wacky ideas. The latest is that they're offering an honor system to pay for content on any website. The concept is based on what they did for Stephen King's novel where people could pay for some content if they chose to. The system will tie into Amazon's database, so any previous customer of Amazon could use their "one-click" feature to pay for content on another site. There are, of course, plenty of problems with this. In some sense, I guess it's competing with PayPal, which charges much less in terms of fees. Also, it's completely voluntary, and then refundable. So, someone could pay for content, and then ask for a refund. It will be interesting to see if it catches on, however. Anyone feel like paying for Techdirt? Update: It appears that Amazon made the rounds of lots of humor sites to get them to sign up for this service (which I still don't see why it's better than PayPal). My favorite take on this, though, is that of Modern Humorist, who has decided to use whatever money they get from the Honor System to buy Jeff Bezos a barbecue grill.

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