This looks to be a lot like their One-Click option, and a related concept, Google Pay. In short, once your information (credit card number, shipping address, or paypal info) has been entered one time, future transactions are absurdly simple.
If vendors catch on, when shoppers go to a new and strange site, they can pay the same way as other, familiar sites, and don’t have to create a new account, or even login.
From my point of view as a shopper, I think this is great. I’ll bet I’ve created hundreds of accounts on hundreds of Internet shopping sites, with hundreds of passwords, and even though I write each one down, it’s a holy hassle to look it up and enter the same billing, shipping, credit card data again and again. And 9 times out of 10 some field isn’t accepted due to site differences and stupid programming errors, and I have to figure out what they want or I’m stuck. I’ve closed many windows before buying for exactly that reason.
To the merchant: I just want to buy the fucking product and get outta here; I won’t be a perpetual and loyal customer and don’t give a fuck about your needs for product reviews or customer satisfaction surveys. So take my money, ship me my stuff, and everyone is happy. Which is why I gravitate towards sites that accept PayPal; this bypasses pages of data, useless to me, that I have to enter.
So I think this is a step in the right direction. But I’m sure someone will disagree with me. Go for it. Tell me what’s wrong with this.
I certainly like it to be easy to buy, but I very much fear making it TOO easy to buy.
If all I wanted to do was to check my shopping cart to see how much express shipping and sales tax costs, I don’t want amazon to go ahead and bill me since they already have all my information on file.
I may have removed something important in the link, thinking it was specific to my computer.
Then you probably HATE One-click ordering.
Why would they? “See shopping cart” is not the same as “place order” or “pay here.” No reputable merchant service will bill you without showing the charges first.
I love Amazon and always check them first but believe it or not, they actually don’t have everything on the planet - at least not at the best prices. For example I recently needed to get a vacuum desiccator and desiccant and while Amazon had a few, I got a much better deal someplace else. Plus I’ve had some bad experiences with some of their vendors and prefer to only buy things that are actually sold by Amazon anyway.
So I see this as being win-win for Amazon and any allied merchants. Amazon gets a cut of the profits on the financial transactions just like Visa plus probably gets to data mine the purchasing info and the vendors get a boost from the convenience and probably one from various Amazon tie-ins.
I don’t see anything wrong with it but from what I can tell there’s nothing exciting about it. It’s just another merchant API option for store owners to choose from. It’s exactly like PayPal, but happens to not be PayPal.
Vendors who have spent a lot of money integrating PayPal probably won’t switch. Vendors who have spent a lot of money building their own interface to work with their gateway probably won’t switch.
Vendors building new sites might give Amazon a go. Or not, because their programmer is already well versed in the PayPal API. So it might be cheaper and easier to stick with the API the programmer already knows.
Vendors who have a beef with PayPal and didn’t already switch to a different payment system might want to switch to the Amazon payment system. You might see it there.
I signed up for Google Wallet once, to buy something and get a sign-up discount. I think that was maybe 3 years ago and I’ve never been offered the chance to use it again I don’t think. Or if I did, I didn’t bother.
Anyway, if this takes off then cool. It’ll be a replacement for PayPal. But from what I understand of it, it won’t be any better than PayPal API integrated sites. It’ll be the exact same thing, just with Amazon, which doesn’t seem to piss people off as much (yet).
I don’t see how Prime works in to this, sorry. No way are little Web vendors going to give you free shipping because you paid Amazon $79. They still have to shell out for shipping, and ship the item to you.
One-click will be a part of it, maybe. Because Amazon has patented the idea, I believe.
I honestly thought they were already doing this. I had bought a few download video form Stand up Comedians (Louis CK etc.) direct from those Comedian’s web sites that used Amazon as the pay method. Isn’t that what this is?
They have some case studies and testimonials on their Amazon Payments site, so I’m guessing they rolled it out to some companies to try before making it completely public.