News

Amazon Pay seeks foothold in brick-and-mortar marketplace

November 27, 2018

Amazon is making a push to get its Amazon Pay digital wallet into restaurants, gas stations and other merchants that it doesn’t directly compete against, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal.

The move is an effort by Amazon to challenge Apple Pay, the dominant mobile wallet in the U.S., and to grow its share of a mobile payments market that remains relatively weak domestically compared with Asia and other regions where mobile payments are widespread, according to the report.

The report does not indicate how Amazon Pay might be used at checkout; some wallets — such as Apple Pay — employ RFID-enabled tap and pay technology while others utilize a QR code that is scanned by a point-of-sale device.

Apple Pay was accepted at about 5 million locations as of May, according to the report. 

In Asia, Alipay and WeChat Pay are the leading apps in the mobile payments space.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the report saying that it is simply speculation.