Amazon Pay is an online payments processing service owned by

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

. Launched in 2007, Amazon Pay uses the consumer base of Amazon.com and focuses on giving users the option to pay with their Amazon accounts on external merchant websites. As of October 2024, the service was available to businesses based in 18 countries:

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

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Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

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, and the

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. Amazon Pay announced a partnership with Worldpay in 2019, allowing Worldpay clients to enable Amazon Pay as a part of the same integration.

Products

Amazon Pay incorporates a variety of products for buyers and merchants to process online payments.

Amazon Pay

Amazon Pay provides the option to purchase goods and services from websites and mobile apps using the addresses and payment methods stored in the Amazon account, such as credit cards or a direct debit bank account or the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in

Amazon Pay Express

Amazon Pay Express is a payments processing service for simple

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

use cases on websites. It is built on Amazon Pay but without requiring a full e-commerce integration, it can be used to create a button that can be copied and pasted onto a website or added via a

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

plug-in. It is best suited for merchants selling a small number of products with a single item in each order, such as a digital download.

Amazon Pay UPI

On 14 February 2019, Amazon launched Amazon Pay Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for Android users in partnership with

Axis Bank Axis Bank Limited, formerly known as UTI Bank (1993–2007), is an Indian Multinational corporation, multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Mumbai. It is India's third largest private sector bank by assets and fo ...

. This service issues UPI IDs to its Indian customers to allow for secure payments. The mechanism of Amazon Pay UPI is the same as other UPI apps like

BHIM BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) is an Indian state-owned mobile payment app developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Launched on 30 December 2016, it is intended to fa ...

Paytm Paytm (an acronym for "Pay Through Mobile") is an Indian Multinational corporation, multinational Fintech, financial technology company, that specializes in digital wallet, digital payments and financial services, based in Noida, India. Paytm ...

and PhonePe. Anyone with Amazon India app can access this service. By mid-2024, Amazon Pay was one of the top 10 apps on UPI, accounting for 0.5% of all transactions in July 2024.

Evolution

Checkout by Amazon (CBA)

Checkout by Amazon (CBA) was an e-commerce solution that allowed web merchants to accept Amazon account information and use Amazon for payment processing. CBA could manage several aspects of the transaction, including order processing, promotional discounts, shipping rates, sales tax calculation, and up-selling. Depending on the merchant's needs, CBA could be integrated into the merchant's systems with manual processing (through Seller Central) or through SOAP APIs or downloadable CSV files. CBA also claimed to reduce the bad debt because of Amazon's fraud detection capabilities. CBA was discontinued in the UK and Germany in 2016 and in the US in April 2017.

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS)

Flexible Payments Service (FPS) was an Amazon Web Service that allowed money transfer between two entities using a technology built on single, multiple, and unlimited use payment tokens. Merchants managed their service use via API or solution providers. They accessed the account through a merchant account on the Amazon Payments website. The service was launched as a limited beta in August 2007 and, later in February 2009, was promoted to General Availability. FPS differed from CBA because FPS did not handle additional capabilities associated with order processing, such as promotions, tax, and shipping. FPS also provided the payments processing for the Amazon Web Services DevPay service but it was discontinued in June 2015.

GoPago technology acquisition

In 2013 Amazon acquired GoPago's technology (mPayment) and hired their engineering and product teams. Amazon was interested in the mobile payment business. GoPago's app allows shoppers to order and pay for goods and services before arriving at a company.

Pay with Alexa

In 2020, Amazon enabled Alexa users to pay for gas by talking to Alexa.

Security

On September 22, 2010, Amazon published a security advisory regarding a security flaw in its Amazon Payments SDKs. This flaw allows a shopper to shop for free in web stores using those SDKs. Amazon mandated all web stores to upgrade to its new SDKs before November 1, 2010. Amazon acknowledged security researcher Rui Wang for finding this bug. The detail of the flaw is documented in the paper "How to Shop for Free Online - Security Analysis of Cashier-as-a-Service Based Web Stores" by Rui Wang, Shuo Chen, XiaoFeng Wang, and Shaz Qadeer.

References

External links

Official website
{{Digital payment providers Amazon (company) Financial services companies established in 2007 Banking technology Online payments Mobile payments WordPress