←back to thread

Amazon-Stripe partnership

(stripe.com)
258 points polyrand | 5 comments | 23 Jan 23 15:38 UTC | HN request time: 1.209s | source
Show context
vishnugupta ◴[23 Jan 23 17:17 UTC] No.34491814[source]▶
I worked on Amazon Payments systems for quite some time back in the day. We took pride in being the best payment processors. Had direct connections with card networks, banks and what not. We even launched a PayPal competitor[1]. They launched a Square like device for physical retailers[2]. They invested some serious money in building and maintaining all of that.

However going by this news seems like Amazon has more or less given up on their payments ambitions. Could be also due to recent layoffs. This is a big news. Maybe Amazon wants to focus on being good at few things instead of running hundreds of experiments.

Edit: References.

[1] https://pay.amazon.com

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/10/30/amazon-kills...

replies(13): >>34492285 #>>34492424 #>>34492477 #>>34492540 #>>34492858 #>>34493001 #>>34493308 #>>34493477 #>>34494414 #>>34494441 #>>34495105 #>>34495487 #>>34496533 #
1. ChrisNorstrom ◴[23 Jan 23 18:06 UTC] No.34492540[source]▶
joke So how long until an Amazon representative complains on HNews about Stripe locking them out of their account and not telling them why?

No seriously, I used to use Amazon Pay for years long ago when it first became available for woocommerce powered stores and I specifically stopped because I had to manually download and go through all my weekly reports and add up the fees I was paying for my business's taxes. As advanced as Amazon can be sometimes they are very dinosaur like when it comes to financial reports or taxes. It took decades for them to collect taxes from sellers. Took years for them to finally catch a couple that were scamming millions of dollars in returns out of sellers. I stopped bothering with any Amazon products because of the years of glitches, gotchas, lack of reports, lack of understanding user intent or use cases. And the thing is, Amazon Pay was great, I had a lot of customers that used it and prefered to pay that way.

replies(1): >>34492987 #
2. ShinTakuya ◴[23 Jan 23 18:36 UTC] No.34492987[source]▶
Payments are hard, it's no coincidence that only a handful of tech companies do it well despite it being one of the more lucrative areas to do business in.

Makes sense for Amazon to work with a market leader in this case rather than spend years playing catch up. Perhaps in the long run they'll acquire Stripe instead of simply partnering.

replies(1): >>34493080 #
3. qqtt ◴[23 Jan 23 18:43 UTC] No.34493080[source]▶
It's pretty wild that Amazon is playing "catch up" at all. Amazon Pay was launched years before Stripe was even founded. Not to mention Amazon has been at the forefront of online payments since the 90s (Amazon itself was founded 4 years before PayPal).

There is some dogma that Amazon is peerless at building platforms and developing APIs, but this is a pretty big failure to capture the market given a huge head start.

replies(1): >>34497814 #
4. txcwpalpha ◴[24 Jan 23 01:25 UTC] No.34497814{3}[source]▶
I don't see how this is a failure at all. Amazon Pay and Stripe are not competitors. Amazon Pay is a customer-facing service that makes it easier for customers to enter their credit card information and use it across multiple websites. Stripe is the backend service that processes those payments for on financial networks.

This announcement is about these services coexisting, not about them competing.

replies(1): >>34513430 #
5. qqtt ◴[25 Jan 23 02:00 UTC] No.34513430{4}[source]▶
Amazon Pay *NOW* is just a customer-facing service, but originally it was envisioned as a PayPal/Stripe type service for transferring money. It has evolved greatly over the years, and in the years before Stripe was even founded it was attempting to compete with PayPal (and ultimately what ended up being Stripe as well).

For example, here is the original press release for FPS: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2007/08/02/amazon...

I do see the Amazon Pay evolution (especially this expanded partnership with Stripe) as a distinct failure to capture the payment market.