Amazon launches 'Login and Pay' service in direct challenge to PayPal

'Pay with Amazon' button to appear on partner websites

Amazon has announced a new "Login and Pay with Amazon" service for financial transactions on its websites and products, directly challenging PayPal's dominance in the sector.

Launching the service at the Money2020 conference in Las Vegas, vice president of payments at Amazon, Tom Taylor, said that the service "enables companies to make millions of [Amazon's] customers their customers by inviting online shoppers with Amazon credentials to access their account information safely and securely with a single login".

The company demoed "Pay with Amazon" buttons appearing on various commerce websites in a similar style to PayPal's service, suggesting Amazon is consciously declaring all-out war on the eBay-owned e-commerce platform, which first began collecting online payments as Confinity in 1998.

While Amazon has been offering payment services for a while, appearing on such sites as Kickstarter as a payment processing method, this will be the first time a login and payment button appears directly on partner sites, instead of a relocation service.

Amazon also already offers "Login with Amazon", which rivals similar offerings by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, enabling users to log-in to sites and services using pre-stored data from their membership of social media services, instead of having to input new data.

Amazon announced it had, once again, failed to make a profit in its second quarter earnings of 2013, but that sales were nevertheless up by 22 per cent, to $15.7bn.