Amazon Shutters P2P

Amazon is formally pulling the plug on it free person-to-person funds transfer service WebPay as of October 13, 2014.

“We are not addressing a customer pain point particularly better than anyone else. We’ve learned a great deal about how and when customers want to send money and will look for ways to use these lessons in the future,” the company noted in a post on the WebPay site. 

In the same posting, Amazon also confirms in its FAQ section that there will be no alternative method by which Amazon users can send money to each other directly.  Those who have already been using the service will not see P2P transactions effected as long as they are initiated before October 13.  After that date it will not be possible to initiate new transactions, and from that point on recipients will have 30 days to claim their funds.  Funds not claimed after 30 days will be returned to the original sender.

Since its inception, Amazon’s P2P service has trailed PayPal’s rival Web Pay service.  PayPal WebPay users can fund payments using a credit card, Amazon users can not.

In cases where senders didn’t have an account balance in their Amazon Payments account to cover a payment, a user could choose to use the credit card on file with Amazon. However, so doing created a situation wherein credit-card companies would likely charge the same fees as a cash advance for WebPay payments.