Amazon this morning announced a new partnership with Clover, which makes point-of-sale devices for restaurants, to get its payment service Amazon Pay in eateries in Seattle and across the East Coast.
For restaurants, the new partnership, called Amazon Pay Places means a simplified process for online pick up orders. Diners order through the Amazon app, and that order is sent directly to the kitchen through the restaurant’s existing POS system. That means restaurants get greater exposure via the Amazon app, without having to set up additional devices or changing their work flow in order to receive and process orders.
“Amazon Pay Places introduces new customers to ordering online without any new hardware — the restaurant uses the same point of sale and the customer just uses their Amazon app,” according to an FAQ about the new service.
At this stage, restaurants select only 10 items to be displayed through the service to “keep this simple for you and the customer,” according to the FAQ. Amazon takes a 10 percent cut of each order through the service to cover marketing, payment processing and fraud protection.
Amazon did not say how many restaurants the partnership applies to, but the deal does encompass eateries in the Seattle area, as well as New York, Washington, D.C. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Amazon launched the program over the summer with T.G.I. Fridays over the summer.
Formerly known as Pay with Amazon, Amazon Pay lets customers use their Amazon accounts to pay on sites beyond Amazon.com. Amazon Pay competes with PayPal and other third-party payment services.
Earlier this year, Amazon said more than 33 million unique customers have used Amazon Payments since the service launched in 2013. That’s an increase of 10 million from the cumulative total of 23 million customers announced the previous year. The volume of payments made through the service also nearly doubled in 2016.
