Amazon launches its own payment system in France
Amazon Pay allows Internet users to pay for their purchases online without entering their bank details. The system is already in place on the site of Nature et Decouvertes and Colette.
Amazon is following PayPal. The e-commerce giant announced Tuesday the launch of Amazon Pay, an option that allows to pay on other merchant sites thanks to its Amazon identifiers. The purchase is then made thanks to the bank data stored by the e-commerce giant. The system is currently available at three sites in France: the Colette store in Paris, the Doctipharma platform and the online store of the Nature et Decouvers brand. Any merchant will be able to integrate this payment option from Tuesday.
"Our goal is to create a reflex Amazon Pay, no matter where you shop," says Giulio Montemagno, head of Amazon Pay Europe. "We offer merchant partners a safe service and a brand that is well known to Internet users." Amazon acts as a trusted third party. They only keep the bank details and transfers the addresses of deliveries already informed by their customers. Nearly 1/3 of the transactions on Amazon Pay is done from a mobile device.
"We see Amazon Pay as our investment on Amazon Web Services, our online hosting service. We already developed these tools for our own needs in e-commerce, and we now offer to other companies, "sums up Giulio Montemagno. This expertise is also a new remedy for Amazon. For each purchase made, the giant e-commerce recovers a commission amounting between 1.4 and 3.4% of the amount of the order. It also charges 25 cents each sale made via this system.
PayPal securely implanted
Payment management for third parties is a promise of Amazon formulated for a long time. Despite their expertise in e-commerce and online shopping, with one-click payment, they took time to offer such services. Amazon Pay was launched in 2013 in the United States. Today, 33 million customers have already used the option for at least one purchase. By comparison, the PayPal platform, which also allows transactions on any online site, has nearly 200 million users. The latter has an advantage over Amazon: it does not risk to compete with the activities of its customers, since not doing e-commerce. Amazon, on the other hand, never accepted PayPal as a payment option on its site. The service, launched in 1998, has long been owned by its eBay competitor. Nevertheless, PayPal has been an independent company since 2015. In January, its CEO told the Bloomberg site to be in discussions with Amazon to integrate PayPal, while refusing to say more.
Another serious competitor of Amazon in the area of online payment is the system Apple Pay, which allows to pay its purchases in stores through its mobile, but also on the Internet. It is already available in 13 countries, including France. More than 2 million sites have already integrated this payment option.
Google has developed a comparable system with Android Pay, available for in-store or online payments. But Amazon is also considering other means of payment. In the United States, it now allows buyers to credit their account in cash, depositing currency in partner stores.
Source (in French): http://www.lefigaro.fr/secteur/high-tech/2017/04/18/32001-20170418ARTFIG00008-amazon-lance-son-propre-systeme-de-paiement-en-france.php
