PayPal – Tech Narratives

This is an interesting but not unexpected development – PayPal already powers lots of payments for e-commerce purchases online, and the biggest past barrier to doing the same with Amazon was the close ties between PayPal and eBay. With that relationship now severed, PayPal is free to pursue this opportunity further, and with Amazon the largest e-commerce retailer in the US and a number of other markets, that could be a big boost. It’s less obvious that it will make a huge difference for Amazon, since it has credit cards on file for many of its regular customers, but it could well help reduce friction for occasional or first-time users, potentially providing a wider funnel for eventual Prime members. The other interesting wrinkle here, of course, is that even without the eBay angle, these two companies still compete with each other for web payments – Amazon has a much smaller third party payments platform which is used as an alternative to PayPal by some online retailers.

via Bloomberg