‘Pay With Amazon’ Buttons Launch On Mobile

Amazon’s payment button is on the move.

Though it was first announced back in 2013, “Pay with Amazon” — which provides eCommerce customers with the ability to use their payment information on file with Amazon to make purchases on other websites — is now going to be made available on mobile apps, reports Re/code.

The move, the outlet points out, is in line with the reason Patrick Gauthier was brought over from PayPal to become Amazon’s vice president of external payments: to build for the eCommerce giant a payments business that extends beyond Amazon itself into the wide world of Web- and app-based commerce at large — perhaps even positioning the service as a competitor to PayPal itself in that regard.

If there was a central reason for Amazon’s apparently careful pace in taking its payment button into the realm of mobile — as well as, as Re/code shares, “tripling down” on its implementation in overseas markets such as Japan — Re/code suggests that perhaps it is the hesitance of competing (and, by nature of Amazon’s business model, smaller) online shops to let Amazon gain visibility into their transactions.

For its part, Amazon doesn’t give credence to that perception. In a recent interview, Gauthier pointed to the example of Amazon Marketplace — which allows competing merchants to sell their own wares — as proof that the company, with its “Pay with Amazon” button, has no interest in breaking the trust of others.

He posed the rhetorical question: “What do you think would happen to that business the instant we became even within a mile of breaching the trust of those merchants?” The implied answer being that Amazon would only be hurting its own bottom line by doing so.

As “Pay with Amazon” prepares its move to mobile (the in-app implementation, notes Re/code, will for now require shoppers to leave the site on which they’re making a purchase in order to confirm their payment details on Amazon’s mobile site) — partnering on the launch with tee-time booking service GolfNow — the service overall, according to Gauthier, has grown 180 percent year over year, with the external payments division of Amazon focusing on businesses with annual sales of $1 million to $1 billion.

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