Amazon.com Inc. has announced the expansion of its payments offerings for small businesses.
The Seattle e-commerce giant unveiled two services on Tuesday, Checkout and Simple Pay, that let merchants use a version of Amazon.com's own checkout system on their sites.
Checkout lets merchants accept payments on credit and debit cards that consumers have registered to use with Amazon.com. It also supports Amazon.com's one-click checkout process and can be integrated with Amazon.com's fulfillment system.
Simple Pay is a simplified version of the Checkout service. Unlike Checkout, Simple Pay does not calculate taxes and shipping rates, nor does it link to Amazon.com's one-click system.
"If you don't need Amazon's end-to-end checkout pipeline and order management capabilities but still want to enable your customers to use their payment information already on file at Amazon.com, use Amazon Simple Pay," the company said on its Web site. Spokespeople did not return calls this week.
For transactions of up to $10, Amazon charges 5% of the transaction amount, plus 5 cents, to process the payment. For transactions of $10 to $3,000, it charges 2.9%, plus a 30-cent base fee. For purchases larger than $3,000, Amazon offers lower percentage rates.
Last year Amazon.com introduced its Flexible Payments Service, which let merchants take credit cards and automated clearing house payments. Users pay rates similar to those for Checkout and Simple Pay for card payments, but ACH payments of any size cost 2% of the transaction amount, plus 5 cents.
Amazon also expanded its payments capability in December by buying a minority stake in the instant online credit company Bill Me Later Inc. It began offering the service in June.
Bill Me Later works with several other large e-commerce sites and this week announced a deal with Universal Air Travel Plan Inc. that would facilitate its use with airlines.
