Amazon shuts down P2P payments service

Amazon shuts down P2P payments service

Amazon is killing off WebPay, admitting that the person-to-person money transfer service is not good enough to keep persevering with.

For several years, WebPay has let Amazon Payments users send, receive, and request money by entering a contact's email address and the sum on a webpage.

But with Google, Square and PayPal among the big guns offering similar P2P transfer services, the e-commerce giant has decided to pull the plug from 13 October. Transactions initiated prior to this date will not be affected and recipients have 30 days to claim funds before money is returned to the sender.

Explaining the decision, Amazon says on its site: "We are not addressing a customer pain point particularly better than anyone else."

Amazon says that it does not offer an alternative P2P system but it is not clear if the firm plans to abandon the field completely. Over the summer it advertised a job which involved building a "low-friction person-to-person (P2P) payments experience."

Recently though, it has concentrated its efforts on payments at the point-of-sale, launching an mPOS system to take on Square, PayPal and others on the high street.

Separately, Login and Pay with Amazon, a service which lets people use their log-in details to make purchases on other e-commerce sites, has arrived in Europe a year after it launched in the US.

Annemarie Jung, director, external payments Europe, Amazon Payments Europe, says: "With Login and Pay with Amazon, businesses in Europe can now streamline the customer account creation and payment process on their website with the backing of a brand consumers know and trust."

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