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.







