Amazon Reportedly Launching Online Payments Service

A new report on Reuters today says that Amazon has plans to launch a new online payments service in an effort to compete with the likes of PayPal – as if you didn’t already give Amazon enough of your money. Apparently the service will launch sometime today, and is set to coincide with the reveal of the company’s first foray into making and selling its own smartphone, currently scheduled for June 18.

The report explains that the payments service will quite simply give users the option of paying for various different goods or subscriptions through their Amazon accounts, using the payment information that’s already on file with users’ accounts. Amazon will take a little extra for a fee, giving users a new option for paying for phone bills and goods offered by third-party sellers on the digital retailer, while Amazon earns cash for doing almost nothing except acting as a middleman. It’s a pretty smart move, and chances are very good that, barring any huge mistakes in the launch, it should be a massive success.

Amazon vice president of seller services offered up some comments in an interview with Reuters regarding the new service, which, based on looking Amazon’s homepage, has yet to be formally announced:

“You should see it as one of many things that we’ll do to expand where people might think about Amazon helping them. If you think about giving a merchant that you may not know very well the right to continue to charge your credit card in the future, you really want to know that a good relationship with Amazon stands behind that.”

It’ll be interesting to see how the payment service works when it’s officially launched. But considering how well Amazon seems to have dominated every other industry it enters, don’t be surprised if PayPal becomes a thing of the past in the not-too-distant future.

[Source: Reuters]