Amazon is an e-commerce behemoth. With over 310 million active members and 353 million products on its marketplaces, the giants of online retail have turned their attention to online payment services.
While the company’s Amazon Pay format has been in existence since 2007, it wasn’t until 2017 that it began to roll out to nations outside of the US. The United Kingdom began to use the service in June of last year.
Amazon Pay aims to introduce the company’s familiar checkout process for customers of other merchants worldwide. Users are able to use their saved information from Amazon accounts to complete swift purchases from websites that they’ve never before accessed – without the need of completing any sign-up forms or adding address information in what is a secure and seamless experience.
PayPal remains the dominant force when it comes to handling transactions online, but Amazon Pay is rapidly gaining momentum if the figures are to be believed. According to Econsultancy, over 33 million Amazon customers have now used its payment services – with its transaction volume doubling between 2016 and 2017. The online store also claimed that the number of merchants offering Pay with Amazon has grown by 120% in the same timeframe.
Whether you’re a fan of Amazon’s industry might or not, the inroads it’s making into the world of online payments can’t be ignored.
But why Amazon? And why is its approach gaining more popularity than other payment providers? Here, we explore the power of fluidity that Amazon is embedding into its services.
A trustworthy name
“Amazon Pay offers a buying experience you can trust” is the tagline that greets would-be associated merchants browsing the payment provider’s website.
Its Amazon’s branding that promises a greater degree of trust from audiences that are likely much more familiar with the multinational company than your own business. This invokes a feeling of confidence from potential customers that can’t be organically replicated and encourages more visitors to begin the checkout process.
This Amazon-to-third-party-business brings an integrated and professional look to websites whether they belong to big businesses or small ones, and with little cost to the merchant’s brand identity.
One-Click
Because customers are able to checkout using their pre-existing Amazon account information, it enables them to buy goods and services in a fraction of the time it would take to create an account with a retailer or ‘checkout as a guest’.
Early embracers of Amazon Pay include AllSaints, Lenovo and Build.com, with AllSaints claiming that the switch has seen conversions increase by 1/3 while the checkout process has become over 70 seconds quicker.
Such figures clearly point to customers supporting the fluid checkout process that wouldn’t otherwise be available.
One of Amazon’s greatest and most recognisable innovations has been its ‘1-Click’ checkouts for customers, and its incorporation onto external businesses sites via Amazon Pay is a key part of its appeal for companies and their visitors alike.
Amazon Pay Places
Last year, Amazon launched Amazon Pay Places, which took the company’s online payment processes into the real world.
Initially launching in tandem with TGI Fridays, customers were able to order food from the comfort of a few button-clicks of their phone and pay online using their Amazon account information. Their food would be taken to their table for an easy dining experience that required very little staff interaction.
Amazon aims to bring their Pay Places services beyond the restaurant industry and into a format much like Ocado in the UK, where customers can order supermarket goods in advance.
This is once again evidence of Amazon’s belief in achieving success through customer convenience.
Ends justifying means?
By now it’s worth pointing out that Amazon aims to make a healthy profit from merchants that are keen to introduce their fast and recognisable checkout process onto their e-commerce site.
With processing fees of between 1.4 and 3.4% depending on monthly payment volume along with a 20p authorisation fee, the market leading retailer will be comfortably expanding their profit margins with every external adopter that registers.
So is it worth jumping on the bandwagon? Given the importance of brand identity and the want of a hassle-free checkout process, Amazon Pay offers something that many websites aren’t in a position to provide themselves. Whether this atones for its processing fees is circumstantial – but with a user base that’s doubled in the previous year, you may be buying early bird tickets to a revolution in the way e-commerce websites process payments.
