Amazon Expands Payment Services

Merchants serving thousands of online shoppers could help Amazon promote its own payments solution instead of PayPal, now that the e-tail giant added 25 new e-commerce solution providers to its list of partners.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) just announced that 25 new shopping cart providers including Magento, Miva Merchant and ShopVisible, will support Amazon Payments, which lets online store owners use the e-tail giant’s back-end system to process online purchases.

In addition, Convio, a software and services provider to the non-profit community, is integrating Amazon Payments into its fundraising platform to enable its client base to accept alternate payment methods for online donations. Also, updated plug-ins for open source e-commerce platforms, such as osCommerce and ZenCart, are now available for the integration of Amazon Payments.

“Working with shopping cart and e-commerce solution providers to make sure their solutions seamlessly integrate with Amazon Payments was one of our immediate priorities when we launched Amazon Payments less than a year ago,” Mark Stabingas, general manager of Amazon Payments, said in a statement. “Now businesses have an additional option for getting started with Amazon Payments and reaching Amazon’s tens of millions of customers with the easiest way for customers to complete a purchase, while also enjoying the benefits of Amazon’s fraud-detection technologies.”

The news comes as rival eBay is betting heavily on PayPal for future growth. Right now, eBay is ramping up its rollout of PayPal overseas as it repositions the online payment system as one of its core businesses, with a goal that it will generate one-third of eBay’s revenue this year.

PayPal president Scott Thompson recently told analysts he is forecasting that the division will double total payment volume to between $100 billion and $120 billion by 2011. This will be done primarily by expanding market share in foreign markets, which he slated would go from 58 percent now to between 73 percent and 78 percent by 2011.

eBay’s payment division will also bolster its promotion of BillMeLater, and announced that later this year the online lay-a-way service will be fully integrated into the PayPal wallet system.

Thompson also said opening the PayPal platform up to developers this year and a boost in mobile PayPal technology would position the company’s payment system for greater prominence.