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Mighty e-commerce firm Amazon.com ( AMZN ) is launching its payments service on several platforms that cater to small and midsize businesses, the company said Monday. Called the Global Partner Program , the new business will allow firms that build e-tail storefronts on the platforms Amazon is partnering with to integrate the “Pay With Amazon” feature. Pay With Amazon aims to reduce any friction when checking out online. By logging in with Amazon, shoppers don’t have to enter a 16-digit credit card number and other billing details. Rival payments firms such as PayPal ( PYPL ) have been working on reducing friction at checkout for years. Partners in Amazon’s Global Partner Program include Japan-based FutureShop, France-based PrestaShop and Canada-based Shopify ( SHOP ). Amazon stock fell nearly 1%, to 593.19, on the stock market today . The company has an IBD Composite Rating of 77, where 99 is the highest. Amazon stock is forming a cup base, with a buy point of 696.54, after touching a seven-month low of 474 in early February. The new payments program “could help Amazon reach a much larger audience of merchants,” Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird, told IBD via email. “However, I believe there are still channel conflicts that may exist with allowing Amazon to see transaction data. In fact, Shopify and others already have relationships with payment platforms such as PayPal and Stripe. As such, it may still be an uphill battle for Amazon payments to gain a lot more traction with merchants. “That said, Amazon does have a lot of customers who may wish to use Amazon payments, and the plus side for merchants would be higher transaction volumes.” Wedbush analyst Gil Luria says Amazon has struggled for years to make headway in the payments business against firms such as PayPal. Apple ( AAPL ) and Google, a unit of Alphabet ( GOOGL ), also have entered the payments sector with digital wallet technologies that revolve around use of cellphones for payments transactions. The Amazon announcement is hot on the heels of similar moves by PayPal and Square ( SQ ). On Wednesday, Square said it planned to add Web checkout capabilities to its payment processing product — a direct challenge to much larger competitor PayPal, which has more than 13 million merchants vs. Square’s 2 million. Also Wednesday, PayPal’s Braintree unit — which boasts that it processes payments for startups such as Airbnb, Jet.com and Uber — announced that it was partnering with several all-in-one e-commerce platforms, such as BigCommerce. Scalper1 News
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