Might Amazon be launching a payments service — today? According on a report from Reuters, Amazon will be introducing a payment service — purportedly today — which will attempt to make it easier for Amazon users to make subscription-based or recurring payments. The service will let businesses access Amazon’s 240 million monthly active users to charge for things like a monthly cell phone bill or music subscriptions using the credit card information stored on Amazon.com. This appears to be a somewhat limited payments service in that it is restricted to recurring charges. To expand the service — one that allows users to purchase items in a retail store, for instance — would likely require Amazon to offer a payments option within a mobile operating system. And that is a significant hurdle to overcome. Amazon’s current mobile OS, used in the Kindle, is a highly customized version of Android. Because that OS is not broadly adopted today, analysts believe Amazon must make inroads into mobile hardware in order to seize substantial payments marketshare. As such, Amazon faces a number of hurdles. First, while Amazon has an extensive background as an e-commerce company, as a hardware manufacturer it remains behind Google and Apple. […]
↧