If you regularly buy products using your mobile, you'll be familiar with the idea of clicking on a payment button, being redirected to your account with a third-party provider, entering a password that lets you pay for services or products without revealing your credit card details, and then being redirected back to the vendor's site.
If you have done this before, then the chances are that the first word that will pop into your mind will be 'Paypal' - the name of the web's most prevalent online payment processing company.
That may be about to change, at least when it comes to mobile eCommerce, as online giant Amazon enters the mobile payments market. Amazon's new offering, the Mobile Payments Service, allows vendors to place a 'Pay with Amazon' button on their sites, provide one-click payment facilities, refund completed payments and more.
The system is already in place on the mobile site belonging to Handmark, the publisher of software and games for handheld devices. However, Amazon still has a lot of ground to cover if it is to compete with Paypal and vendors like Apple's iTunes. According to paidcontent.org, iTunes has 100 million credit cards on its files, whilst Paypal has in the region of 68.6 million accounts - although there is no data available on how many of those are active.
From a general eCommerce point of view, though, the news is excellent and is likely to spark off additional competition - and that's got to be good for site owners. If you are interested in implementing eCommerce systems on your own site, talk to us - we're the web design agency that can help you choose the system that best suits your business objectives.
