PayPal said recently that it has been talking with Amazon about adopting its payments service on Amazon.com, but the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is reporting significant growth today for its own rival payments service for third-party sites.
A cumulative total of more than 33 million unique customers have used Amazon Payments since the service launched in 2013, the company announced Tuesday morning. That’s an increase of 10 million from the cumulative total of 23 million customers announced a year ago. The volume of payments made through the service also nearly doubled in 2016, the company said, without disclosing specific numbers.
The service, known as Pay with Amazon, lets customers use their Amazon accounts to pay on sites beyond Amazon.com.
The service expanded to France, Italy and Spain in addition to its brick-and-mortar bookstores in 2016, which likely accounted for a large portion of its growth.
“As we have introduced new experiences with merchants, we have seen a significant increase in the number of customers using the information from their Amazon account to make purchases on merchant websites,” Amazon Payments VP Patrick Gauthier said in a statement. “Amazon Payments brings the simplicity and familiarity of Amazon’s buying experience to our merchant customers, making it easy for millions of Amazon customers around the world to pay using the information already stored in their Amazon account.”
Most Amazon Payment customers were on mobile, the company said, with the average payment being $80. One transaction, however, was worth $40,000, Amazon said. The company didn’t say what was sold.
Amazon’s announcement touting its payment service comes two week after PayPal CEO Dan Schulman told Bloomberg News the companies had discussed allowing Amazon customers to pay with PayPal. Amazon declined to comment for that report. Paypal had more than 197 million active users as of the end of the year.
