7 ms·

Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts to Adopt Payment System

99 points by uptown 9y ago

saudioger 9y ago
1. Offer someone a deal that's too good to be true, because it is. 2. hemorrhage money while undercutting competition 3. Jack up prices once you've got enough market penetration to stick around or have killed your competition
- jfoutz 9y ago
  3. Implement your business now that you have enough transaction data to prove you can do it profitably
flylib 9y ago
Amazon uses Stripe as well for some of it's transactions https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-quietly-starts-using-stripe-process-e-commerce-transactions/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-quietly-starts-using-st...
tramGG 9y ago
Perfect play to: 1. Find out what people are buying in stores and not on amazon, and figure out how to get them to switch 2. Use this data to target more advertising/recommendations across amazon 3. Use the purchase data to perhaps create whole new brick and mortar stores that cater to the most in-demand products in different areas, like a more targeted walmart -- squeezing out the stores that once bought into this program. I'd say it's a short term win, at the sake of long term loss of stores. That being said, companies like this should declare a non-compete with the businesses they're luring in. Chomp!
arzt 9y ago
Increasing returns in action.
voicedYoda 9y ago
If I were a retailer, I’d be extremely leery of the largest e-tailer asking me to process my payments. My customers know what they are buying from me. And would the payment processor. And if the payment processor can subvert my shop for their online store, then why would my client come back to me? I know customer service, humaning, and all sorts of other anecdotes are supposed to help, but in the end, folks just want the best quality for the cheapest price. Barring that, if a vendor offers a cheaper replacement that can be delivered to the client’s door, why would they come back to my shop? And this doesn’t even mention the itemized list of all stock that I might be selling that this larger retailer now knows about me….
- dazc 9y ago
  Agree with the sentiment but, purely from personal experience, I really don't like submitting my details for every retailer I might buy stuff from. Not so much from a security pov but all the hoops I have to jump through like creating a username and password that's actually accepted first time, and so on. I've gotten to the stage now where I won't buy from another retailer where I have to create another account, if at all possible. As consequence my online purchase history (aside from grocery shopping) for the past 3 years is almost exclusively amazon. If I were a retailer I would be looking to make the buying process as slick and seamless as possible and, alas, amazon can provide me with a solution.
- matte_black 9y ago
  Same reason anyone goes to a shop these days: They want the item now. People aren’t going to magically discover Amazon now if they process payments. Most retail shoppers are well aware they can buy the same items online for cheaper or at least the same price. What retailers should really fear is a world where people no longer buy things impulsively or at the exact moment of need.
ilamont 9y ago
As a merchant Amazon has to take a few other steps before I use Amazon Pay. About a year ago I attempted to use the Amazon Pay WooCommerce Extension but had to turn it off because it was basically taking over the checkout page, placing itself at the very top of the page above the other payment options (https://in30minutes.com/amazon-pay-woocommerce-extension-why-turn-off/ https://in30minutes.com/amazon-pay-woocommerce-extension-why...). Another consideration: How many vendors want to give even more power to the Amazon juggernaut? I like dealing with healthy, balanced ecosystems, and right now Amazon has far too much power in my product niche (publishing). It sucks dealing with policy changes, neglect of the piracy problem, and the fear that my account may be summarily penalized because of some algorithmic tweak or obscure violation (recent example: "One or more of your products doesn't meet the financial threshold established by Amazon and is no longer eligible for advertising via Amazon Marketing Services." WTF does that even mean?) The last thing I want to see is the payments space similarly dominated by a greedy, uncaring giantco that "owns" the customers coming to my website. The behavior with the WooCommerce extension made me realize how bad they can be.
- roburtguy 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with the extension, but you can build your own using their sdk. Extensions and auto-generated options usually have intrusive design choices.
simonsarris 9y ago
$PYPL hugely down on the news. $SQ took a hit too, weirdly. (I mean at 2:50 PM, after hours is separate with SQ's earnings tonight) Amazon dips its toes in this space all the time. It's hard to tell how serious they are. Amazon Pay has been relaunched at least once. Amazon Register (CC processor which competed with Square) died in 2015: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-down-its-register-credit-card-processor/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-do... Amazon Handmade (the Etsy killer) went nowhere and languishes. Surprised they didn't kill it yet. Amazon WebPay shut down years ago: https://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/09/11/amazon-killing-free-p2p-money-transfer-service-webpay-october-13-2014/ https://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/09/11/amazon-killing-fre... How do merchants know the investment is worth it this time? (Especially if they may some day eat your market, once they have enough data on it.)
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  It isn't worth the risk to switch to Amazon. The payments industry right now is cutthroat, with First Data offering clients rates like 1.5 cents per transaction and no basis points over interchange. This is insane compared to what the merchant industry was charging just a few years ago, to the point that many of First Data's own ISOs are being severely undercut on price by the company that provides their own backend. Why would you choose to be at Amazon's behest, when you can pay less and know you won't need to lift a finger for multiple years wrt credit & debit processing.
  - sho 9y ago
    > First Data offering clients rates like 1.5 cents per transaction and no basis points over interchange WTF? Where are they offering this!? Even if this is true, which sounds unbelievable, it's certainly not available globally
    - StudentStuff 9y ago
      They've been offering it to most of the clients I used to work with in the grocery industry, Mercury is matching it too. Might not be available to every SIC, but perhaps its a good excuse to buy into a small grocer that does $150k/month in processing and run all your volume through that. Grocers pay among the lowest rates for credit card processing, I think that was a big part of Amazon's very loud attempts at grocery. They don't care whether it succeeds if it knocks a few dozen basis points off their interchange rates!
resoluteteeth 9y ago
This is pretty confusing, because it seemed like Amazon made a big push to sign merchants up for its payment service 10 years ago and then completely abandoned it.
delecti 9y ago
From a merchant perspective, I totally understand being wary. Even as a former Amazon employee I'm regularly surprised to learn new areas the company has expanded into. But from a customer perspective, I'd be glad for this to take off. I would prefer to checkout using Amazon as a payment processor than Paypal, and Square (seemingly the other prominent option these days) doesn't seem to let me use a single set of credentials across merchants, which is always obnoxious. From a customer perspective, I've had almost nothing but good experiences with Amazon, and most of the bad ones (delivery estimate issues) wouldn't impact this space.
stanmancan 9y ago
This would be the last thing I would want to use as a retail store. 1) Customer buys product X from me 2) Payment is processed by Amazon 3) Amazon matches the customer with their own records, sends an advertisement for that same product, at a lower cost 4a) Customer returns product and buys from Amazon 4b) Customer orders from Amazon next time they need it Edit: For the record, Amazon wouldn't even need to be able to identify the exact products you purchased, enough damage could be done based only on your businesses classification. Technology, clothing, houseware ect.
- ars 9y ago
  These are people who already have Amazon accounts. If the product was cheaper at Amazon they would have made the purchase there from the start. There's no way Amazon could lower the price enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a return - not to mention you often have to pay return shipping.
  - pixl97 9y ago
    >There's no way Amazon could lower the price enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a return Customer: Wow, I like this $100 blender. Amazon: You could have got it from us for <strike>$110</strike> we mean $80. Customer: Damn, I paid too much, I guess I'll just shop Amazon first next time.
    - stanmancan 9y ago
      This exactly. I think a lot of people forget how far a dollar has to go for some people.
    - ars 9y ago
      > I guess I'll just shop Amazon first next time. Keep in mind, this is already an Amazon customer. They almost certainly already shop Amazon first. This is a given before you even start. If you are using this, it's either because you are selling things Amazon doesn't sell (and despite how large they are, there's a ton of stuff like that). Or you have some kind of advantage over Amazon that they can not match. If all you are doing is matching, or slightly beating Amazon, you already lost before you even implemented Amazon Pay.
superkuh 9y ago
I was wondering what was up with the amazonpay.com domain that appeared in my NoScript list sometime the last couple week (on amazon.com). So far Amazon still works without enabling it but I doubt that'll last.
userchris 9y ago
Not related to the content of the article, but I'm impressed that Bloomberg managed to add another layer of dark patterns to the auto playing scrolling video- there's a full video overlay that you have to click through to unmute the audio before you can actually stop the video from playing.
- radley 9y ago
  If you're on Firefox, you can disable HTML5 autoplay: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autoplay/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...
- r00fus 9y ago
  On Safari/macOS with content blocking, it auto-plays but is muted by default (remembered setting from before).
stevespang 9y ago
. . and then, just like what they are doing to Prime now - - they raise your rates for payment processing up to par or even higher.
chrischen 9y ago
One big advantage of PayPal over other payment methods (that's usually lost on consumers) is that they have extremely friendly merchant policies when it comes to fraud or seller protection. With a credit card all it takes is a button press (or phone call) to reverse a charge and it gets with-held for about 90 days at best, and completely reversed with no recourse at worst. According to Stripe, card companies do not communicate back about the status of these disputes in any way, and no discussion is allowed except for one response from the merchant which requires you to send PDFs (mostly automated by Stripe). They don't even tell you if the customer withdraws the dispute and funds still get held for up to 90 days!. And valid reasons range from fraud (on the buyer side) to simply dissatisfaction with a product, all of which becomes the merchant's burden to bear. On top of that, to add insult to injury, the credit card company adds a fee to provide you with this terrible service. PayPal, and most other "payment facilitators" do a much better job handling disputes. In PayPal's case they provide a much fairer arbitration process (funds are held by PayPal, and a website with message thread is created allowing communication between the merchant, customer, and arbitrator). The whole process happens within a span of days rather than months. And PayPal manages to do this without charging any more than credit card companies do (via Stripe et al). I've also done disputes through Affirm, a PayPal competitor, and they equally handled them in a fair and easy manner. This ends up making credit cards super risky for smaller merchants if their transaction volume is low and transaction amounts are high. As someone who runs a small business I highly welcome these alternative payment facilitators, even if they charge the same rates as credit cards, because they do provide a much improved service over the old credit card companies, and that's even with all the convenience features services like Stripe provides.
- snark42 9y ago
  > PayPal, and most other "payment facilitators" do a much better job handling disputes. In PayPal's case they provide a much fairer arbitration process (funds are held by PayPal, and a website with message thread is created allowing communication between the merchant, customer, and arbitrator). How does this work if the customer paid Paypal with a credit card and initiated a chargeback? I get the credit card/user could be blacklisted but PayPal would still be out the money even if the seller won the arbitration case.
akeck 9y ago
When is doing something like this considered illegal "tying"?
- ars 9y ago
  Maybe if Amazon required Amazon pay in order to use Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment. I can't think of any other case that might apply for tying.
SN76477 9y ago
As a consumer I like Amazon but this has a lot of potential to cross ethical lines. I do not want to see Amazon analyzing my buying patterns across more vendors.
- whoisjuan 9y ago
  They already do it. Credit Card companies like MasterCard and AmEx have been selling data to advertisers for at least 8 years now. That plus all the data you can extrapolate from other sources can give anyone an accurate picture of your consumption habits.
  - whadaythunka 9y ago
    Is this in their TOS? Do you know whether one can opt out? Are there any electronic payments schemes that (excluding the e-coins) don't share consumption data?
    - whoisjuan 9y ago
      It seems that you can actually opt-out. Here is the website for MasterCard opt out: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/privacy/data-analytics-opt-out.html https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/... You probably can find similar pages for other companies.
      - KumarAseem 9y ago
        Their wording is very confusing for me - "To opt-out from our anonymization of your personal information to perform data analyses, please provide your Mastercard or Maestro payment card number below." To me it sounds like, "we are anonymizing your personal info, but you can opt-out and allow us to perform data analytics using your personal info as it is."
      - scrollaway 9y ago
        This claims the data is anonymized. I honestly don't really care if my purchases are analyzed in aggregate. I understood GP to be more concerned about personalized data being sold to advertisers. I certainly would be.

99 points by uptown 9y ago

1. Offer someone a deal that's too good to be true, because it is. 2. hemorrhage money while undercutting competition 3. Jack up prices once you've got enough market penetration to stick around or have killed your competition

jfoutz 9y ago
3. Implement your business now that you have enough transaction data to prove you can do it profitably

flylib 9y ago

Amazon uses Stripe as well for some of it's transactions https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-quietly-starts-using-stripe-process-e-commerce-transactions/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-quietly-starts-using-st...

tramGG 9y ago

Perfect play to: 1. Find out what people are buying in stores and not on amazon, and figure out how to get them to switch 2. Use this data to target more advertising/recommendations across amazon 3. Use the purchase data to perhaps create whole new brick and mortar stores that cater to the most in-demand products in different areas, like a more targeted walmart -- squeezing out the stores that once bought into this program. I'd say it's a short term win, at the sake of long term loss of stores. That being said, companies like this should declare a non-compete with the businesses they're luring in. Chomp!

arzt 9y ago

Increasing returns in action.

voicedYoda 9y ago

If I were a retailer, I’d be extremely leery of the largest e-tailer asking me to process my payments. My customers know what they are buying from me. And would the payment processor. And if the payment processor can subvert my shop for their online store, then why would my client come back to me? I know customer service, humaning, and all sorts of other anecdotes are supposed to help, but in the end, folks just want the best quality for the cheapest price. Barring that, if a vendor offers a cheaper replacement that can be delivered to the client’s door, why would they come back to my shop? And this doesn’t even mention the itemized list of all stock that I might be selling that this larger retailer now knows about me….

dazc 9y ago
Agree with the sentiment but, purely from personal experience, I really don't like submitting my details for every retailer I might buy stuff from. Not so much from a security pov but all the hoops I have to jump through like creating a username and password that's actually accepted first time, and so on. I've gotten to the stage now where I won't buy from another retailer where I have to create another account, if at all possible. As consequence my online purchase history (aside from grocery shopping) for the past 3 years is almost exclusively amazon. If I were a retailer I would be looking to make the buying process as slick and seamless as possible and, alas, amazon can provide me with a solution.
matte_black 9y ago
Same reason anyone goes to a shop these days: They want the item now. People aren’t going to magically discover Amazon now if they process payments. Most retail shoppers are well aware they can buy the same items online for cheaper or at least the same price. What retailers should really fear is a world where people no longer buy things impulsively or at the exact moment of need.

ilamont 9y ago

As a merchant Amazon has to take a few other steps before I use Amazon Pay. About a year ago I attempted to use the Amazon Pay WooCommerce Extension but had to turn it off because it was basically taking over the checkout page, placing itself at the very top of the page above the other payment options (https://in30minutes.com/amazon-pay-woocommerce-extension-why-turn-off/ https://in30minutes.com/amazon-pay-woocommerce-extension-why...). Another consideration: How many vendors want to give even more power to the Amazon juggernaut? I like dealing with healthy, balanced ecosystems, and right now Amazon has far too much power in my product niche (publishing). It sucks dealing with policy changes, neglect of the piracy problem, and the fear that my account may be summarily penalized because of some algorithmic tweak or obscure violation (recent example: "One or more of your products doesn't meet the financial threshold established by Amazon and is no longer eligible for advertising via Amazon Marketing Services." WTF does that even mean?) The last thing I want to see is the payments space similarly dominated by a greedy, uncaring giantco that "owns" the customers coming to my website. The behavior with the WooCommerce extension made me realize how bad they can be.

roburtguy 9y ago
I'm not familiar with the extension, but you can build your own using their sdk. Extensions and auto-generated options usually have intrusive design choices.

simonsarris 9y ago

$PYPL hugely down on the news. $SQ took a hit too, weirdly. (I mean at 2:50 PM, after hours is separate with SQ's earnings tonight) Amazon dips its toes in this space all the time. It's hard to tell how serious they are. Amazon Pay has been relaunched at least once. Amazon Register (CC processor which competed with Square) died in 2015: https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-down-its-register-credit-card-processor/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-do... Amazon Handmade (the Etsy killer) went nowhere and languishes. Surprised they didn't kill it yet. Amazon WebPay shut down years ago: https://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/09/11/amazon-killing-free-p2p-money-transfer-service-webpay-october-13-2014/ https://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/09/11/amazon-killing-fre... How do merchants know the investment is worth it this time? (Especially if they may some day eat your market, once they have enough data on it.)

StudentStuff 9y ago
It isn't worth the risk to switch to Amazon. The payments industry right now is cutthroat, with First Data offering clients rates like 1.5 cents per transaction and no basis points over interchange. This is insane compared to what the merchant industry was charging just a few years ago, to the point that many of First Data's own ISOs are being severely undercut on price by the company that provides their own backend. Why would you choose to be at Amazon's behest, when you can pay less and know you won't need to lift a finger for multiple years wrt credit & debit processing.
- sho 9y ago
  > First Data offering clients rates like 1.5 cents per transaction and no basis points over interchange WTF? Where are they offering this!? Even if this is true, which sounds unbelievable, it's certainly not available globally
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    They've been offering it to most of the clients I used to work with in the grocery industry, Mercury is matching it too. Might not be available to every SIC, but perhaps its a good excuse to buy into a small grocer that does $150k/month in processing and run all your volume through that. Grocers pay among the lowest rates for credit card processing, I think that was a big part of Amazon's very loud attempts at grocery. They don't care whether it succeeds if it knocks a few dozen basis points off their interchange rates!

resoluteteeth 9y ago

This is pretty confusing, because it seemed like Amazon made a big push to sign merchants up for its payment service 10 years ago and then completely abandoned it.

delecti 9y ago

From a merchant perspective, I totally understand being wary. Even as a former Amazon employee I'm regularly surprised to learn new areas the company has expanded into. But from a customer perspective, I'd be glad for this to take off. I would prefer to checkout using Amazon as a payment processor than Paypal, and Square (seemingly the other prominent option these days) doesn't seem to let me use a single set of credentials across merchants, which is always obnoxious. From a customer perspective, I've had almost nothing but good experiences with Amazon, and most of the bad ones (delivery estimate issues) wouldn't impact this space.

stanmancan 9y ago

This would be the last thing I would want to use as a retail store. 1) Customer buys product X from me 2) Payment is processed by Amazon 3) Amazon matches the customer with their own records, sends an advertisement for that same product, at a lower cost 4a) Customer returns product and buys from Amazon 4b) Customer orders from Amazon next time they need it Edit: For the record, Amazon wouldn't even need to be able to identify the exact products you purchased, enough damage could be done based only on your businesses classification. Technology, clothing, houseware ect.

ars 9y ago
These are people who already have Amazon accounts. If the product was cheaper at Amazon they would have made the purchase there from the start. There's no way Amazon could lower the price enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a return - not to mention you often have to pay return shipping.
- pixl97 9y ago
  >There's no way Amazon could lower the price enough to offset the hassle of dealing with a return Customer: Wow, I like this $100 blender. Amazon: You could have got it from us for <strike>$110</strike> we mean $80. Customer: Damn, I paid too much, I guess I'll just shop Amazon first next time.
  - stanmancan 9y ago
    This exactly. I think a lot of people forget how far a dollar has to go for some people.
  - ars 9y ago
    > I guess I'll just shop Amazon first next time. Keep in mind, this is already an Amazon customer. They almost certainly already shop Amazon first. This is a given before you even start. If you are using this, it's either because you are selling things Amazon doesn't sell (and despite how large they are, there's a ton of stuff like that). Or you have some kind of advantage over Amazon that they can not match. If all you are doing is matching, or slightly beating Amazon, you already lost before you even implemented Amazon Pay.

superkuh 9y ago

I was wondering what was up with the amazonpay.com domain that appeared in my NoScript list sometime the last couple week (on amazon.com). So far Amazon still works without enabling it but I doubt that'll last.

userchris 9y ago

Not related to the content of the article, but I'm impressed that Bloomberg managed to add another layer of dark patterns to the auto playing scrolling video- there's a full video overlay that you have to click through to unmute the audio before you can actually stop the video from playing.

radley 9y ago
If you're on Firefox, you can disable HTML5 autoplay: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autoplay/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...
r00fus 9y ago
On Safari/macOS with content blocking, it auto-plays but is muted by default (remembered setting from before).

stevespang 9y ago

. . and then, just like what they are doing to Prime now - - they raise your rates for payment processing up to par or even higher.

chrischen 9y ago

One big advantage of PayPal over other payment methods (that's usually lost on consumers) is that they have extremely friendly merchant policies when it comes to fraud or seller protection. With a credit card all it takes is a button press (or phone call) to reverse a charge and it gets with-held for about 90 days at best, and completely reversed with no recourse at worst. According to Stripe, card companies do not communicate back about the status of these disputes in any way, and no discussion is allowed except for one response from the merchant which requires you to send PDFs (mostly automated by Stripe). They don't even tell you if the customer withdraws the dispute and funds still get held for up to 90 days!. And valid reasons range from fraud (on the buyer side) to simply dissatisfaction with a product, all of which becomes the merchant's burden to bear. On top of that, to add insult to injury, the credit card company adds a fee to provide you with this terrible service. PayPal, and most other "payment facilitators" do a much better job handling disputes. In PayPal's case they provide a much fairer arbitration process (funds are held by PayPal, and a website with message thread is created allowing communication between the merchant, customer, and arbitrator). The whole process happens within a span of days rather than months. And PayPal manages to do this without charging any more than credit card companies do (via Stripe et al). I've also done disputes through Affirm, a PayPal competitor, and they equally handled them in a fair and easy manner. This ends up making credit cards super risky for smaller merchants if their transaction volume is low and transaction amounts are high. As someone who runs a small business I highly welcome these alternative payment facilitators, even if they charge the same rates as credit cards, because they do provide a much improved service over the old credit card companies, and that's even with all the convenience features services like Stripe provides.

snark42 9y ago
> PayPal, and most other "payment facilitators" do a much better job handling disputes. In PayPal's case they provide a much fairer arbitration process (funds are held by PayPal, and a website with message thread is created allowing communication between the merchant, customer, and arbitrator). How does this work if the customer paid Paypal with a credit card and initiated a chargeback? I get the credit card/user could be blacklisted but PayPal would still be out the money even if the seller won the arbitration case.

akeck 9y ago

When is doing something like this considered illegal "tying"?

ars 9y ago
Maybe if Amazon required Amazon pay in order to use Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment. I can't think of any other case that might apply for tying.

SN76477 9y ago

As a consumer I like Amazon but this has a lot of potential to cross ethical lines. I do not want to see Amazon analyzing my buying patterns across more vendors.

whoisjuan 9y ago
They already do it. Credit Card companies like MasterCard and AmEx have been selling data to advertisers for at least 8 years now. That plus all the data you can extrapolate from other sources can give anyone an accurate picture of your consumption habits.
- whadaythunka 9y ago
  Is this in their TOS? Do you know whether one can opt out? Are there any electronic payments schemes that (excluding the e-coins) don't share consumption data?
  - whoisjuan 9y ago
    It seems that you can actually opt-out. Here is the website for MasterCard opt out: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/privacy/data-analytics-opt-out.html https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/about-mastercard/what-we-do/... You probably can find similar pages for other companies.
    - KumarAseem 9y ago
      Their wording is very confusing for me - "To opt-out from our anonymization of your personal information to perform data analyses, please provide your Mastercard or Maestro payment card number below." To me it sounds like, "we are anonymizing your personal info, but you can opt-out and allow us to perform data analytics using your personal info as it is."
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      This claims the data is anonymized. I honestly don't really care if my purchases are analyzed in aggregate. I understood GP to be more concerned about personalized data being sold to advertisers. I certainly would be.