Amazon brings competitor for Apple Pay and Google Wallet to mobile apps

Amazon seems to want to play a bigger role in the digital payment market. The online department store comes with a payment button that developers can use in mobile apps. In addition, Amazon also wants to play a greater role on websites.

The statements come from Amazon CEO Patrick Gauthier, who is in charge of the payment service at the company, in a conversation with Re/code. The intention is to make the existing digital payment service Pay with Amazon suitable for use in mobile applications: developers can then use the service to make payments via Amazon. Because Amazon has 200 million customers worldwide, it would be easy for many users to use the stored payment data in other places as well, or so the idea.

Pay with Amazon has been available to merchants for use within websites for some time. Amazon also wants to play a bigger role there; the online department store is committed to attracting more companies. Until now, Pay with Amazon has not yet managed to attract large customers and the use of the payment button is therefore limited in practice.

According to Re/code, Amazon’s mobile payment service is even less convenient than competitors such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet. For example, payments must be confirmed via the browser, so that the user has to leave the application in which the purchase is made. Incidentally, Amazon has not yet built in support for NFC payments.

Amazon’s payment service has also been criticized. Because the company also sells stuff itself, it could benefit from insight into competitors’ transactions. Amazon itself says that the payment service is disconnected from the rest of the company. In the past year, use of the service is said to have grown by 180 percent, but precise figures on the number of customers are not available.