Amazon wants its customers to take their wallets with them when they leave the giant Web store.
The Seattle-based online retailer unveiled on Tuesday a new payment service that it will offer other online retailers to use on their Web sites. That means the 81 million customers who have already given Amazon.com their payment details, like credit card numbers and shipping addresses, will be able to use that information, without entering it again, to buy products on any site that uses the new service.
Checkout by Amazon, as the service is called, will also let these Web sites use Amazon’s one-click ordering system, easily calculate sales tax and shipping costs, and let their customers track the shipment of their purchases.
“Customers will be coming through an experience that is really similar to Amazon’s,” said Mark Stabingas, vice president of Amazon Payments. “People will like the familiarity and the comfort associated with that.”
Checkout by Amazon, and a similar but more basic service introduced on Tuesday called Amazon Simple Pay, will compete with PayPal, among the fastest growing divisions of the auction giant eBay. Analysts do not believe eBay will allow its sellers to accept Amazon payments on the core eBay.com marketplace. But other retailers who offer PayPal on their own sites will now have expanded options.
Two years ago, Google also introduced a payment system, called Google Checkout, but it has not widely caught on with Web sellers.
One advantage PayPal has over Amazon is that many large retailers see Amazon as a competitor. Companies like Toys “R” Us and Borders, the book chain, have retreated from selling products on Amazon.com, complaining that the company was undermining their sales on the site and using their sales data to compete more effectively with them.
“Many larger retailers express concern about partnering with Amazon because Amazon is one of their largest competitors and they don’t want Amazon to know their information,” said Scot Wingo, the chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, a company that helps retailers sell online. “On the other hand, eBay and PayPal aren’t going to use sales data to go source products themselves because they are not a retailer.”
Amazon does seem to keep competing with the same retailers it is trying to help. Another new product that Amazon has introduced, Universal Wish List, is a Web browser toolbar that lets people directly add the products they covet to their Amazon account when they see them on other Web sites.
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