Amazon is preparing to break out of the confines of its e-commerce site by building a person-to-person payments service and a point-of-sale system based on Kindle tablets for bricks-and mortar retailers.
In a job ad spotted by TechCrunch, Amazon confirms that it is seeking to move from "e-commerce to commerce in general", building products and services that can be used to buy and sell in the real world.
One of the products is person-to-person payments, an area which would put Amazon in direct competition with PayPal and provide the e-commerce giant with a useful tool for its widely anticipated mobile phone, expected to launch later this year.
Meanwhile, the company is also planning to take on PayPal, Square and more traditional POS vendors such as VeriFone with a checkout system for bricks-and-mortar retailers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The new product could combine a credit card reader with a Kindle tablet and will tap GoPago, the start-up from which Amazon bought technology and hired engineers late last year.
Amazon has also recently applied for a patent for a card that would link all of a user's credit cards to one Amazon card for selection via an app on consumer mobiles.
Earlier this week it was reported that another tech giant, Apple, is also preparing to jump further into the payments arena through the launch of a mobile wallet service for iPhone, iPad and iTunes users.