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Amazon Offers Retailers Discounts To Adopt Payment System (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon is offering to pass along the discounts it gets on credit-card fees to other retailers if they use its online payments service, according to people with knowledge of the matter, in a new threat to PayPal and card-issuing banks. The move shows Amazon is willing to sacrifice the profitability of its payments system to spread its use. Swipe fees are a $90 billion-a-year business for lenders such as JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, networks including Visa and Mastercard, and payment processors like First Data and Stripe, which pocket a fraction of every sale when shoppers swipe cards or click "buy now."
The financial industry's fees amount to about 2 percent of a typical credit-card transaction, or 24 cents for debit. But big stores such as Amazon and Walmart have long been able to negotiate lower rates for themselves based on their massive sales volume. Now, Amazon is offering to pass its discount along to at least some smaller merchants if they agree to embrace its Amazon Pay service. Previously, online merchants using Amazon's service have paid about 2.9 percent of each credit-card transaction plus 30 cents, which is divvied up among Amazon, card issuers and payment networks.
The financial industry's fees amount to about 2 percent of a typical credit-card transaction, or 24 cents for debit. But big stores such as Amazon and Walmart have long been able to negotiate lower rates for themselves based on their massive sales volume. Now, Amazon is offering to pass its discount along to at least some smaller merchants if they agree to embrace its Amazon Pay service. Previously, online merchants using Amazon's service have paid about 2.9 percent of each credit-card transaction plus 30 cents, which is divvied up among Amazon, card issuers and payment networks.
Any retailer that helps out Amazon in any way is dead, already. It's just a question of when. Relying on, or working with your largest competitor generally doesn't work out in business.
Best Buy started selling some new Amazon gadget exclusively a few weeks ago. That's the end of them.
I don't respond to AC's.
Square already makes it pretty cheap. And if you're lucky enough not to have problems with Paypal (I'm that lucky, so far) they do too. Making Amazon more powerful is not in anyone's best interests
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
they desperately want to track customers of other retailers; while at the same time, use the extra volume to leverage even lower transaction rates for themselves.
amazon is not being generous, they're being their data-whoring selves; and will use the extra data gathered against those same retailers who willingly gave it up to save a fraction of a percent in transaction fees.
Forgoing profits to build market share works.
Amazon forwent profits for almost 2 decades while building market share, originally just selling books.
I can see them easily outlasting many of the other pay schemes. (Despite the moaning of vendors and the promises of Libertarians, tt actually costs a certain amount of money to track a transaction and credit is a loan of money and that costs something, too.)
Paypal and Square will continue to dominate the small business because setting up an account takes literally minutes. On the other hand, when my wife and I tried to set up Amazon Payments for her small business some years ago, it took weeks to sort out all the paperwork, by which time we figured out that Amazon Payments didn't fit our needs.
For medium-sized businesses (like a modest fast-food chain or an Etsy-type site), Amazon Pay might make more sense. Large businesses will likely get screwed by Amazon - that's part of Amazon's business model these days - and can negotiate their own terms with the credit card companies.
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