Amazon Enhances its Payments Service, Adds Recurring Fees Capabilities

With the latest update to its Payments service, Amazon continues to move ever-closer to PayPal in terms of services offered. Amazon Payments has been a great competitor to PayPal since its launching for simply sending money to someone, or paying for a product on the marketplace, but it’s fallen short where recurring fees are concerned. As such, it’s been largely ignored by those offering subscriptions for services or products. But now, that shortcoming has been resolved.

Amazon’s been testing out its recurring fees capability in recent months with mobile carrier Ting, and the results have been great. Now, with the company finally having opened up this functionality, I hope to see vendors all over begin to accept payments via the service – after all, there’s nothing really to lose; fees are on par with or better than PayPal’s. The biggest reason I’d use Amazon Payments? To not use PayPal, due to its appalling customer service, namely with its tendency to favor the buyer in an eBay dispute (I’ve never been affected, but I haven’t forgotten the horror stories I’ve read).

Nonetheless, Amazon is wise to move further into PayPal’s territory, and hopefully it means that down the road, we might actually see the fees become more competitive. It’s still no fun to shell out $30 for a $1,000 transfer – it’s fees like that, that make me wish Bitcoin did actually catch on in a big way.