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stories filed under: "online payments"
Overhype

Overhype

by Mike Masnick


Filed Under:
online payments, payments, paypal

Companies:
amazon, ebay



Amazon Launches Payment Service... Again

from the let's-try-this-again dept

As was widely expected, Amazon has now launched a new payment service for online retailers as something of a PayPal competitor. Basically, it will let people use their Amazon account info to buy things at other stores. Of course, as others have discovered, taking on PayPal -- while simple in concept -- has proven a lot more difficult in practice. Companies like Google and Yahoo have tried and haven't made much of a dent. Hell, even Amazon has tried this before, though that was a beta launch that never went very far. Actually getting retailers to implement this and then getting customers to use it is the challenge at this point, and it seems likely to be an uphill battle. There's definitely a sense that many people don't like PayPal, but it's so well established that to provide an alternative, you really need to offer something that provides significant value above and beyond Paypal -- and it's not clear that Amazon really does that.

15 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
News You Could Do Without

News You Could Do Without

by Mike Masnick


Filed Under:
online payments, payments, paypal

Companies:
amazon, ebay, paypal



Is Amazon Getting Ready To Take On PayPal?

from the and-would-it-be-effective? dept

Plenty of other companies have tried to take on PayPal and discovered that it was a lot harder than it looked. Even though there are a lot of folks dissatisfied with PayPal, most attempts to compete with it have fallen flat. Even Google's efforts haven't really made a huge dent. However, could Amazon shake things up a bit? Over the years, it's done a few things to put its toes in the water of personal payment systems, and now some are predicting that it's gearing up to launch a full on PayPal competitor in the next few months. The analyst who wrote that report notes that Amazon isn't "just another" PayPal competitor, suggesting that its knowledge and experience with online retailing will allow it to create something better. It would certainly be an interesting fit with other "web services" that Amazon has been offering lately -- and would even tie further into Amazon's existing knowledge and scalability. That said, for whatever reason, this market has been a tough one to crack, so we should probably wait and see what the specifics are (if any) before determining its likelihood of success or failure.

20 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
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