Amazon announced a new program today (April 4) designed to expand Amazon Payments into more eCommerce merchants’ websites.
What this means is that Amazon is making a big push to enable eCommerce platform providers and developers to add the option for their customers to “Pay with Amazon.” Through the program, dubbed the Amazon Payments Partner Program, Amazon is offering a set of tools and services to help these partners grow their merchant business by offering the ability to integrate with Amazon.
“The Amazon Payments Partner Program provides Partners with the tools and resources needed to extend the trust and convenience of the Amazon experience to their merchant customers,” said Patrick Gauthier, VP of Amazon Payments. “We are working together across geographies and industries to help merchants grow and create experiences that delight customers throughout the shopping journey.”
The Amazon Payments Partner Program offers eCommerce platform providers and developers options such as solution pre-integration and best practices to make it easier for merchants to adopt the solutions. Amazon also announced that merchants can receive exclusive benefits and services from the program, including knowledge-sharing and white glove integration services. The program is free to participate in and available by invitation in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan.
The Amazon Payments Partner Program also offers: Premier Partner, Certified Partner, and Certified Developer levels, with certified categories for eCommerce platform providers and developers. As members of the Amazon Payments Partner Program, partners can receive account management, planning support, technical resources and training, directory listing, partner designation with exclusive logos, and in some cases may be eligible for co-marketing activities.
“Our merchants want to offer their customers a payment solution that is trusted, easy and familiar,” said Brennan Loh, Director of Business Development at Shopify. “We’re excited to be a Premier Partner in the Amazon Payments Partner Program, enabling our merchants to offer Pay with Amazon.”
For Amazon Payments, a major component of its success has been attributed to the fact that it has established trust among consumers and merchants. This was backed up by PYMNTS research, which concluded that trust was the driving factor behind consumers’ decisions to shop on a particular eCommerce website.
The PYMNTS research project released in the fall of 2015 dug deep into that million-dollar question of how digital shoppers shop, pay and think about trying new payment solutions.
“Together with PYMNTS.com we wanted to take a closer look at what matters most to today’s digital shopper and what we found was stunning. The No. 1 determining factor on whether a consumer chose to make a purchase online was trust, not selection or price, but trust. Trust is paramount to digital shoppers and it’s evident at every stage of the shopping journey,” Gauthier told PYMNTS.
The panel for the research consisted of more than 2,000 online and mobile shoppers, and was conducted in July 2015. Today’s highly engaged digital buyers are young, between the ages 25-34; affluent, with income above $80,000; and also well-educated, with four years of college or more.
Here’s what the research concluded: When consumers were asked where they start their shopping journey when they need to buy something online, they most frequently cited a marketplace. When looking at mobile shoppers’ behavior, 63 percent of them will start from Google when they are looking for information; 45 percent will start on Amazon when they are searching for a product.
But when asked what was the most important reason for determining where to make the final online purchase, it came down to trust. What these findings show is that customers are choosing retailers that they have a relationship with — even on a digital level. And they are choosing retailers they have built a level of trust with.
When shifting the conversation toward the latest ways in the payments ecosystem to pay online, the results from the survey showed that consumers were two times more likely to both accept/adopt a new payments product from Amazon than Apple.
And when asked about how comfortable consumers would be making an online purchase using a new form of payment while shopping on a mobile device, Amazon also was regarded as almost twice as trusted in the marketplace.
