PayPal payments possible on Amazon

 

 

From 2022 onwards, US customers will be able to pay with PayPal for their purchases on Amazon.com. According to the press release published earlier this month, the option to use Venmo, a popular payments app owned by PayPal, will be added to Amazon’s accepted payment methods next year.

 

The move comes after another eCommerce giant, eBay, is in the process of phasing out PayPal as its sole payment provider. As a result, PayPal transactions on eBay shrank drastically, by 45% in the third quarter of 2021.

 

As it turns out, this was probably the exact opportunity Amazon was waiting for.

 

“We understand our customers want options and flexibility in how they make purchases on Amazon,” said Ben Volk, Amazon’s Director of Global Payment Acceptance. “We're excited to team up with Venmo and give our customers the ability to pay by using their Venmo accounts, providing new ways to pay on Amazon.”

 

 

Founded in 2009, Venmo is a peer-to-peer payment network that started out as a convenient means of payment between its two founders. The idea behind it is to enable users to pay each other without using any cash. Like, for example, when students share a bill on a night out.

 

The Venmo app on a smartphone

 

 

While Venmo later expanded its user base to include businesses (for a 2.9 % transaction fee), it’s still very popular in the field of C2C payments where it’s available without any additional costs.

 

Over the last few years, Venmo has experienced steady growth. From a payment volume of $6.8 billion in the first quarter of 2017, the value of transactions grew to a whopping $67 billion in the second quarter of 2021.

 

PayPal has been there for most of this journey, as it had acquired the app back in 2012.

 

 

Consumers in the US will have to download the Venmo app (if they haven’t already done so) to enhance their payment options on Amazon. For existing Venmo users (currently around 78 million people), this step may prove to be a big one toward streamlining their shopping experience on Amazon.

 

And for Amazon shoppers who aren’t familiar with Venmo, this may be a great opportunity to check out this popular method of payment.

 

 

The more traces a fraudulent seller leaves behind on online marketplaces, the better for brand protection. This is why we at globaleyez were very glad to hear PayPal’s announcement. From now on, it will be harder for dishonest sellers to hide behind the online marketplace they’re using, at least in the US.

 

Right now, when it comes to payments, Amazon has been acting as an intermediary between seller and buyer. When customers pay for their purchases on Amazon, they do so via the marketplace itself, never learning the payment information of the seller in the process. This leaves them more vulnerable to fraud, as without payment data they have very little information to go on when something goes wrong with their purchase.

 

A person using a credit card for a purchase made online

 

 

The same is true for brands whose IP-rights are infringed by sellers offering counterfeited or grey marketed products on Amazon. Luckily, we have a very good working relationship with Amazon (and over a hundred other marketplaces worldwide) which means that we are able to work around this lack of information to ensure the removal of offending listings on behalf of our clients.

 

But from now on, we’ll have even more opportunities to track down fraudulent sellers via their payment information on Amazon.com. And, since we often work with payment providers, including PayPal, to follow fraudulent transactions and remove means of payment from dishonest sellers’ accounts, we expect we’ll be able to deliver even faster results for our clients in the future.

 

Contact us and find out what we can do for your brand.