Amazon Launches Subscription-Based Billing And Payments Service 76
mpicpp (3454017) writes in with news about Amazon's new payments service. "The company launched a service Monday known as Amazon Payments that allows consumers to use their Amazon accounts to send and receive money and shop online at 'thousands of sites other than Amazon.' It's accessible on both desktops and mobile devices. For businesses, Amazon is selling the service as a way to take advantage of its security and user data while saving time for new customers. There's no recurring fee for retailers to use the platform, though Amazon plans to take a standard cut of 2.9% from those businesses, plus $0.30 for each transaction of $10 or more. With more than 244 million active customer accounts, Amazon already has a massive base of potential users for the service. The effort represents a new front in its assault on eBay, which owns online payments service PayPal."
OLD news (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon payments launched in 2007. I've had an account with the service for at least 5 years.
why there is no competition (Score:4, Interesting)
There's two reasons
first Visa and MC both require merchants not to charge extra fro using their card. Thus there's no reason for consumers not to use the most widely accepted cards.
second, even though Visa is a franchise of issuers, the master company avoids putting them in competition.
Thus there's just no easy way for competition to breakout since merchants don't want to just restrict their sales to AMEX holders anymore.
It's also likely it's an illegal price fixed cartel but I don't have any evidence for that.
Re:why there is no competition (Score:4, Interesting)
first Visa and MC both require merchants not to charge extra fro using their card. Thus there's no reason for consumers not to use the most widely accepted cards.
Nope. Not anymore. [nytimes.com]
Briefly (if you don't want to read the link), as a result of a major 2012 settlement with Visa and Mastercard, merchants ARE now allowed to charge fees for credit cards. (There are still restrictions on how exactly this is done; a good summary is here [cardfellow.com].)
Some states have restricted this practice significantly, most commonly requiring that POSTED prices for goods be the higher price, and thus only allowing a "cash discount" rather than an extra "fee" for using credit cards.
I've bought items at two places just in the past couple days that have dual pricing: a gas station and a liquor store. In one case, the advantage of cash pricing far outweighs any credit card bonus point advantage I could get.