Amazon-Stripe partnership

Wait, obviously Amazon has their own checkout software. Is this a name recognition play to have AWS come with Stripe batteries included?

My guess is that Stripe is way better at international payments and by moving US to stripe they can have a single payment processor worldwide.

They do, but Stripe may have other advantages that Amazon's home-grown billing does not... fraud detection comes to mind.

Stripe's superior fraud detection is an open secret in FinTech. There are apparently a lot of large companies with their own payment rails that route riskier looking payments (e.g. a new account who you haven't yet settled a transaction with) through Stripe for this reason.

which probably makes stripe's job even harder, because now there's adverse selection

If there is one company besides Stripe that I'd expect to have high quality fraud detection, I'd name Amazon actually, maybe add PayPal. The largest online retailer in all major markets sans China and Russia by far, you don't get to that position if you're lacking in the anti-fraud department.

(Alternatively, one might say Amazon simply is large enough to eat up the cost of fraud...)

You can charge extra per detected fraud.

If Amazon has good fraud detection, they should consider using it on sellers.

It seems like payments is traveling the inverse of the shipping/delivery route: first build in-house, then add on other fulfillment partners that are able to handle certain payments better.

zing!

Spot on