I’m a huge fan of Amazon. As a consumer I feel the shopping experience leaves much to be desired. But as a former retailer, I’m constantly impressed with Amazon from an infrastructure perspective – specifically their payment and fulfillment capabilities.
I’m surprised more retailers don’t take advantage of Amazon Payments’ solutions, specifically the Checkout by Amazon™ service, which includes tools for businesses to manage shipping charges, sales tax, promotions, and post-sale activities including refunds, cancellations, and chargebacks.
In my opinion, online payments are the most tedious part of a retail operations business – zzzzzzzzzzzz! But more importantly online payments pose the biggest hurdle for consumers when completing transactions.
Amazon gets online payments and the Checkout by Amazon™ service allows retailers to offer a consistent, low-friction checkout experience for Amazon’s customer base which includes over 94 million shoppers. If my math is right that is approximately 30% of the US population. (Note to Retailers: Don’t you want to offer an easy, affordable checkout process to 94 million people?!?)
Amazon has taken much of the pain out of payment for both consumers and retailers. And with last week’s launch of PayPhrase, a new checkout process, they’ve made the payment process even smoother and added some features that could be a game changer when it comes to capturing a larger share of wallet among the Gen Y population.
PayPhrase, which is two or more words and a 4-digit PIN, is an easy-to-remember shortcut to shipping and payment information associated with your Amazon.com account to make purchases at Amazon and across the web without sharing their credit card number.
Why this is a winner for consumers
Using PayPhrase on participating sites allows you to bypass registration and enables payment from one specific credit card that is stored at one location. The program also lets you create up to 20 phrases associated with various credit cards, shipping addresses and even people. For instance, I have one Amazon payment account. And now I can easily shop using one phrase to pay for an order with my corporate card and shipped to my corporate office. And use another phrase on an order shipped to my home and billed to my personal credit card from that one account. It’s a well designed parent-child relationship.
Speaking of parent-child relationships…
Everyone know about the buying power of Gen Y population and enabling teens to buy has been a challenge among ecommerce retailers targeting that demographic for some time.
PayPhrase addresses this challenge by allowing parents to set up phrases for teens and students. Parents can control the amount spent as well as require approval for each order. And each PayPhrase can be configured with additional controls, including monthly spending limits and e-mail alerts. They can even determine if the remaining balance “rollsover” each month.
This feature alone is changing the game. As Amazon’s marketplace expands and more retailers add Checkout by Amazon™ as an option, this gives even more buying power to an already powerful subset of the consumer population. And that’s all before Amazonpayments launches this on their mobile payments system.
The Future Of Retail Is Here 