By
Bena Ilyas
May 13th, 2024
Amazon Pay surges in popularity on merchant websites. Financials host Jason Moser believes PayPal and Apple Pay have clear tech advantages and Fool.com contributor Matt Frankel, CFP, thinks that Amazon’s familiarity gives it an advantage as more consumers adopt digital wallets.
Jason Moser explained that Amazon is making a lot of effort to gain more share in the payments space through Amazon Pay. According to Adobe Analytics, Black Friday pulled in a record $6.22 billion in online sales, which was up almost 24% from a year ago. It was the first day in history to see more than $2 billion in sales stemming from smartphones.
“Not only are we living in an e-commerce world, we’re certainly living in a mobile world, as well,” said Moser.
The truth is that Amazon is making a push to get its Amazon Pay digital wallet into restaurants, gas stations and other merchants that it doesn’t directly compete against.
It still isn’t exactly clear how Amazon Pay might be used at checkout; some wallets — such as Apple Pay — employ RFID-enabled tap and pay technology while others utilize a QR code that is scanned by a point-of-sale device.
Frankel explained how he was recently buying a present for his wife and on the website, there were two payment buttons: one was PayPal button and another was Amazon Pay.
“I was curious, because I had never seen that on a merchant’s website. Amazon really hasn’t pushed it until recently. So, I clicked Amazon Pay, and it took me right to my Amazon checkout, where I have my Amazon credit card already set up. It was just like checking out for a normal Amazon purchase. It took me about two clicks. I actually think PayPal might have something to worry about here.”
Moser then noted the fact that U.S. consumers still aren’t all that digital-wallet-focused. He said:
“You look at something like Apple Pay, for example, as clever as that is, consumers still aren’t embracing that wholeheartedly. Whether it’s Apple Pay or Google Pay or Amazon Pay, the digital wallet, there’s a big opportunity there. That explains why Amazon is pursuing this.”
Frankel explained that he doesn’t think this will steal any market share from people who are already on Apple Pay or PayPal. But there are a lot of people who are not using digital wallets yet who are already comfortable with Amazon’s checkout process.
“I don’t necessarily think they’re going to steal market share or steal existing customers from any of the other ones, but I do think it gives them an advantage recruiting new adopters to digital wallets.
To be perfectly clear, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay all have tremendous growth runways. PayPal’s growth rate could go from 20% to 19%. I’m not saying they’re going to really suffer. To be clear, I still love PayPal on a long-term basis.”
A recent Bloomberg report mentioned that Apple Pay is in the second position, behind PayPal, in the number of active users using the digital wallet. Last year, Amazon also introduced the ability to place orders with TGI Friday’s using the Amazon app. But this push aimed to bring Amazon Pay to a much wider selection of merchants.
While other companies like Apple and Samsung have had a bit of a head start when it comes to getting their digital wallets into brick-and-mortar establishments, there’s still plenty of room for competitors in the US, where last year, only around 1 percent of in-store transactions were completed with some sort of mobile payment.
Apple Pay Takes Over Belgium and Kazakhstan
Apple Pay has gone live in two more countries, with customers of some banks in Belgium and Kazakhstan now able to make purchases in stores using their iPhones via Apple’s mobile payments platform.
Belgium and Kazakhstan become the 30th and 31st region where Apple Pay is officially available. Apple Pay is also set to launch in Germany this year and is “coming soon” to Saudi Arabia, according to Apple.com.
Today, they announced their two new products – Amazon Quantum Ledger Database and Managed Blockchain. With it, they will maintain a complete and verifiable history of data changes, and allow users adjust and manage a scalable blockchain network.