Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
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Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
#2Increasing returns in action.
Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
#3If I were a retailer, I’d be extremely leery of the largest e-tailer asking me to process my payments. My customers know what they are buying from me. And would the payment processor. And if the payment processor can subvert my shop for their online store, then why would my client come back to me? I know customer service, humaning, and all sorts of other anecdotes are supposed to help, but in the end, folks just want the best quality for the cheapest price. Barring that, if a vendor offers a cheaper replacement that can be delivered to the client’s door, why would they come back to my shop?
And this doesn’t even mention the itemized list of all stock that I might be selling that this larger retailer now knows about me….
Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
#4As a merchant Amazon has to take a few other steps before I use Amazon Pay.
About a year ago I attempted to use the Amazon Pay WooCommerce Extension but had to turn it off because it was basically taking over the checkout page, placing itself at the very top of the page above the other payment options (https://in30minutes.com/amazon-pay-woocommerce-extension-why...).
Another consideration: How many vendors want to give even more power to the Amazon juggernaut? I like dealing with healthy, balanced ecosystems, and right now Amazon has far too much power in my product niche (publishing). It sucks dealing with policy changes, neglect of the piracy problem, and the fear that my account may be summarily penalized because of some algorithmic tweak or obscure violation (recent example: "One or more of your products doesn't meet the financial threshold established by Amazon and is no longer eligible for advertising via Amazon Marketing Services." WTF does that even mean?)
The last thing I want to see is the payments space similarly dominated by a greedy, uncaring giantco that "owns" the customers coming to my website. The behavior with the WooCommerce extension made me realize how bad they can be.
Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
#5$PYPL hugely down on the news. $SQ took a hit too, weirdly. (I mean at 2:50 PM, after hours is separate with SQ's earnings tonight)
Amazon dips its toes in this space all the time. It's hard to tell how serious they are.
Amazon Pay has been relaunched at least once.
Amazon Register (CC processor which competed with Square) died in 2015: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-do...
Amazon Handmade (the Etsy killer) went nowhere and languishes. Surprised they didn't kill it yet.
Amazon WebPay shut down years ago: https://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/09/11/amazon-killing-fre...
How do merchants know the investment is worth it this time? (Especially if they may some day eat your market, once they have enough data on it.)
Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
#6This is pretty confusing, because it seemed like Amazon made a big push to sign merchants up for its payment service 10 years ago and then completely abandoned it.
Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
#7From a merchant perspective, I totally understand being wary. Even as a former Amazon employee I'm regularly surprised to learn new areas the company has expanded into.
But from a customer perspective, I'd be glad for this to take off. I would prefer to checkout using Amazon as a payment processor than Paypal, and Square (seemingly the other prominent option these days) doesn't seem to let me use a single set of credentials across merchants, which is always obnoxious. From a customer perspective, I've had almost nothing but good experiences with Amazon, and most of the bad ones (delivery estimate issues) wouldn't impact this space.
Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
#8This would be the last thing I would want to use as a retail store.
1) Customer buys product X from me
2) Payment is processed by Amazon
3) Amazon matches the customer with their own records, sends an advertisement for that same product, at a lower cost
4a) Customer returns product and buys from Amazon
4b) Customer orders from Amazon next time they need it
Edit: For the record, Amazon wouldn't even need to be able to identify the exact products you purchased, enough damage could be done based only on your businesses classification. Technology, clothing, houseware ect.
Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
#9I was wondering what was up with the amazonpay.com domain that appeared in my NoScript list sometime the last couple week (on amazon.com).
So far Amazon still works without enabling it but I doubt that'll last.
Re: Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System
#10Not related to the content of the article, but I'm impressed that Bloomberg managed to add another layer of dark patterns to the auto playing scrolling video- there's a full video overlay that you have to click through to unmute the audio before you can actually stop the video from playing.