cmelbye asks: I'm deciding which way to go for payments for my web application, and I noticed that Amazon does payment processing. I'm wondering how many people actually have an Amazon account with a credit card. Do you?
Yes, I do.
13 points
No, I do not and will not.
1 point
No, I do not, but would consider one if I needed it.
iTunes has 100 million credit cards on file and Amazon claims to have 94 million customers.
PayPal is better for these reasons:
(1) Paypal processes credit card payments for you, even for users that don't have a PayPal account. Amazon only processes payments for customers with an Amazon account, which means your customers need to sign up with Amazon if they don't already have an account.
(2) PayPal accepts payments directly from the user's bank account. AFAICT, Amazon.com doesn't. This means a lot more people can use PayPal than can use Amazon.com.
(3) You can integrate PayPal into your website so that it doesn't even look like a third party is processing the payment. You cannot do this with Amazon Payments.
However, Amazon does have a few points in their favor:
(1) Amazon has built a more trusted brand than PayPal. A lot of people have bad experiences with PayPal. (This usually is not PayPal's fault, but the result of getting ripped on on EBay and then learning that PayPal doesn't provide as much protection against this as a credit card does.)
(2) The PayPal payments page is confusing. On the left, you can enter your credit card info directly. On the right, there's a big "log in to use your PayPal account" box. Users get confused, thinking that they have to use a PayPal account.
(3) The Amazon Payments "Pay Now" button looks cooler than the PayPal "Pay Now" button.
iTunes has 100 million credit cards on file and Amazon claims to have 94 million customers.
PayPal is better for these reasons:
(1) Paypal processes credit card payments for you, even for users that don't have a PayPal account. Amazon only processes payments for customers with an Amazon account, which means your customers need to sign up with Amazon if they don't already have an account.
(2) PayPal accepts payments directly from the user's bank account. AFAICT, Amazon.com doesn't. This means a lot more people can use PayPal than can use Amazon.com.
(3) You can integrate PayPal into your website so that it doesn't even look like a third party is processing the payment. You cannot do this with Amazon Payments.
However, Amazon does have a few points in their favor:
(1) Amazon has built a more trusted brand than PayPal. A lot of people have bad experiences with PayPal. (This usually is not PayPal's fault, but the result of getting ripped on on EBay and then learning that PayPal doesn't provide as much protection against this as a credit card does.)
(2) The PayPal payments page is confusing. On the left, you can enter your credit card info directly. On the right, there's a big "log in to use your PayPal account" box. Users get confused, thinking that they have to use a PayPal account.
(3) The Amazon Payments "Pay Now" button looks cooler than the PayPal "Pay Now" button.