Experiences with Amazon Pay?

Discussions
#1

I’m selling a desktop app online. I use Stripe but people sometimes say they don’t want to pay by card. Either because they don’t have one, or because they don’t want to trust me with their CC details. How do you handle this?

One obvious answer is PayPal. The problem is: Some PayPal features such as subscriptions require a credit card to be associated with the account. This cuts off those of people who don’t have a card.

Amazon Pay looks like it would be a good alternative. Many people have Amazon accounts, with associated payment methods such as bank accounts. The problem is, you don’t find that many online businesses using Amazon Pay.

So my question: Do any of you have experience with Amazon Pay? What’s it like? Can you use it to set up recurring payments when the customer doesn’t have a credit card?

#2

Are there many people who don’t have a credit card who would ALSO be a paying customer?

Seems to me that this is unlikely to be significant enough volumes to worry about (based just on my gut feel so take that for what its worth!).

If you’re B2B then you have to worry about po/invoices/cheques/bank transfers etc as there are some companies who just can’t order things any other way - but then you’re not talking about €14 a pop.

#3

I’ve used FastSpring for a long time, and FastSpring offers my customers many payment options including credit card, PayPal, Amazon Pay, bank transfer, etc. I found that Amazon Pay was consistently about 1% of my sales. (For comparison, direct use of credit card was about 65%, PayPal, about 30%)

I wanted Amazon Pay to be much more successful when it launched, but for some reason, at least in my case, it never was much used.

Can you use it to set up recurring payments when the customer doesn’t have a credit card?

Can’t answer that part of your question, I’m afraid.

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#4

In my experience, the people that prefer not to give you their CC is because they are afraid to be tied to a subscription, hidden charges, etc. In some places, a chargeback is not as easy as login into PayPal and revert the payment.

BTW, as a software vendor you will lose every claim (not under paypal seller protection program), so, unless you have a way to deactivate their license, your money will be gone.

#5

the people that prefer not to give you their CC is because they are afraid to be tied to a subscription, hidden charges, etc.

Very interesting. I mean, it’s logical in a way. But your comment did just make me fully realise that this may be the case. Thanks!

#6

Interesting, thank you for sharing those numbers @SteveMcLeod. You had mentioned the 30% PayPal before, but the 1% Amazon are astounding - and make me think that it may not pay off to implement this.

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#7

Are there many people who don’t have a credit card who would ALSO be a paying customer?

Interesting point @Rhino. I don’t have enough data to tell yet.

#8

I believe I saw your app on HN recently. :slight_smile: Great start, HN was an incredible boost of sales for us – it basically determined the app’s future (the peak day there was over $4k vs. less than $2k in 10 days on Product Hunt).

I second FastSpring – great service, they support lots of different payment systems. Their checkout page looks like it is from 2005 and its layout breaks on mobile but I believe they are working on this according to the previews on their new landing page.

#9

Interesting. Do you know anything about whether FastSpring supports subscriptions?

Thanks for the kind words. Your app looks very cool as well!

#10

Thank you! Yes, they just call it “Recurring billing”.

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#11

Yes. In B2B - it’s the majority. Businesses prefer buying via Purchase Orders, checks, wire transfers etc.

#12

Hey Alex, nice to see you here! We met at MicroConf Barcelona a few years ago :slight_smile:

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#13

If you read the whole comment I said just that 2 sentences down :wink:

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#14

whoops, my bad sorry

#15

I’ve been thinking about this topic some more. In the past, I’ve conducted interviews with consumers (that is, polled my friends and family…) about their online buying. I discovered that many people prefer to buy with PayPal, because (rightly or wrongly) they feel it is safer to purchase via PayPal rather than give their credit card details to an unknown person. They’ve already chosen to give their credit card details to PayPal and would rather use PayPal as an extra barrier between you - the merchant of an online store - and them - the person wanting to buy your product.

So even if using PayPal still doesn’t solve the problem of allowing people to purchase who don’t have a credit card, it should in general take away a barrier to purchasing.

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#16

I remember feeling the same myself in my early 20s when I got my first Visa card – I just was scared to put it into checkout forms online. Even today if a site looks not well-executed, I assume they can leak my card number and would prefer PayPal instead.

#17

@SteveMcLeod, @ivm yes, I’ve heard that from a user as well. It makes sense I guess from the perspective of the customer.

#18

What is HN? Hacker News?

#19

Yup, HN is Hacker News. Sorry, I use it so often that the abbreviation is natural to me.