Amazon to move into P2P and in-store payments

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.

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Amazon to move into P2P and in-store payments

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

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.

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Comments: (2)

A Finextra member 

Its amazing that the success of SQUARE has a lot of big players trying to break into these types of markets with, well, very similar offerings. As usual, where is the real incentive for the business?

A Finextra member 

What is the value proposition for bricks-and-mortar retailers? Square is struggling to move from their base of small-mobile retailers to the larger bricks-and-mortar retailers. This space is very competitive and Square, PayPal and alike actually increase the cost since they are another layer on top of the actual payment processor. From what is described here, Amazon will also struggle since they have no compelling offer for the merchants. On the consumer side, this also looks like another digital wallet – PayPal is the market leader with V.me and MasterPass paying the catchup game. It will be interesting to see what is Amazon's differentiating proposition.

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