Without the fanfare that typically accompanies such product announcements, Amazon.com on Tuesday launched two new online-payment options that target small businesses. That makes Amazon.com a direct competitor with both Google Checkout and eBay’s PayPal.

Amazon is billing Checkout by Amazon as a complete e-commerce checkout solution that provides small business customers a secure and trusted checkout experience. It offers features like Amazon 1-Click, as well as tools for businesses to manage shipping charges, sales tax, promotions and post-sale activities like refunds, cancellations and chargebacks.

The second service, Amazon Simple Pay, is a set of payment-only products that allow a small merchant’s customers to use payment data from their Amazon.com detail as a payment method on the merchant’s Web site.

Checkout by Amazon

Checkout by Amazon promises low friction for Amazon customers. Customers can use the data from their Amazon.com history and other Web sites powered by Amazon.com to complete purchases on the merchant’s Web site without having to

re-enter their shipping address or payment knowledge. Checkout by Amazon plus provides the familiar Amazon.com checkout experience.

Checkout by Amazon can identify Amazon.com customers shopping on the merchant’s Web site and offer them Amazon’s 1-Click experience, and plus makes way for merchants to upsell products within the checkout pipeline. Merchants can even earn Amazon.com organization commissions for upselling Amazon products during checkout.

Checkout by Amazon provides tools to view, edit, settle, and cancel orders; search orders by moment; download orders in a text file; and print shipping labels and packing slips. And merchants can co-brand the checkout pipeline hosted by Amazon Payments with their own logo.

Amazon Tries To Keep It Simple

As its name suggests, Amazon Simple Pay is a simplified payment system. Unlike Checkout by Amazon, it does not supply capabilities to support real-time shipping and tax calculation, promotions, and order management-tasks including order cancellations, order reports…

Original post by Top Tech News