Amazon-Stripe partnership

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...

> Could be also due to recent layoffs.

Just a quick guess I am pulling out of my ass.

Did somebody high up do a cost analysis/breakdown that said: is this entire business org making the company money or can we just use Stripe for less money?

Does it boil down to that gross oversimplification or not?

I'm sure it isn't easy to quantify the intangibles (if there were any) on what edges Amazon had over Stripe and benefitted from by choosing to do it in house. I'm sure it might not seem like an apples-to-apples comparison, but I guess when you zoom out high enough (company spending $X money in, getting Y out) it's comparable to any other purchasable good/service?

Good note when talking about large businesses and org-wide initiatives.

It's easy to forget (looking from the bottom-up) that when you're surveying from the top-down, there are always alternative places to spend $1.

So it isn't enough to make >$1 in return for every $1 invested, you have to offer better return than the other things the company could be doing with that capital.

F.ex. in retail, there's an everpresent alternative of investing in logistics and warehouse automation, which saves the business a LOT of money