Amazon Mobile Payments

Amazon continues to push forward with their innovative mobile strategy hinged upon the ability to facilitate mobile payments. 

Amazon has recently announced the introduction of Amazon Mobile Payments Service (MPS), which will be led by Howard Gefen, formerly vice president of marketing and business development with mobile-payments processor Obopay Inc.

What is Amazon MPS?

From Business Wire:

“Amazon Payments … announced the availability of the Amazon Mobile Payments Service (Amazon MPS), providing developers, merchants and distributors of mobile applications an easy way to process payments from mobile devices and extend Amazon’s 1-Click checkout experience to their customers. Amazon MPS enables tens of millions of Amazon customers to use the existing payment and shipping information in their Amazon.com accounts to make purchases from their mobile devices.”

This is the logical next step in addressing the mobile channel for Amazon, which has already developed applications for the major Smartphone brands.  Amazon has applications for the iPhone, Blackberry and Android allowing users convenient and more importantly unique mobile uses.

Amazon Remembers allows customers to use the Smartphone camera (iPhone, Blackberry, Android) to snap pictures of items they want to remember when out shopping.  The pictures are then stored on the mobile phone as well as Amazon’s website.  Based on your pictures, Amazon Remembers will attempt to find the product, or similar products, online and then send you an e-mail alert and post the result along side the picture you originally took.

Mobile Phone users can also take pictures of items such as DVDs, or alternatively of barcodes, and then Amazon attempts to find matching products from their catalog. In addition to those uses, Google Android users can download MP3s from Amazon utilizing the Amazon MP3 store.

Quickly developing Amazon applications for the major App stores was a good strategy.  It allowed Amazon to not lose out on any mobile commerce or the mobile channel in general.    That strategy also provided Amazon with the necessary time to test the ‘mobile waters’ and ensure mobile payments would be successful for their brand. 

Now that its mobile presence has been proven and established, Amazon Mobile Payment Service (Amazon MPS) will allow Amazon, Amazon merchants and application developers to utilize the mobile channel in a much more cost effective manner. 

Posted on: Tuesday, October 27, 2009