PayPal does have competition

I blogged yesterday about how PayPal is not as pally as they used to be. Some might say that this is because they are the last man standing in the last chance saloon of online payments, but that is not true.

There’s always new competition.

In fact, a year ago, I talked about one big new competitor in the form of Amazon.

Amazon’s checkout service was offered to anyone as a simple drop and click payments app to plug into their website.

So how’s it going?

Going well apparently.

According to website Amazon Strategies Checkout by Amazon, or CBA for short, is offered by over 300 retailers, with several of the top 500 internet retailers using this as their preferred payments tool including:

• Toolking.com - a company that does some great work with social networking and has some innovative micro sites like Tooliday.com;

• Patagonia - a manufacturer that sells direct and via retailers like REI, Dick's Sporting Goods, etc; and

• Jockey - a manufacturer that sells direct.

The comment Amazon Strategies makes is how successful they are doing with online distribution for manufacturers who want to sell direct, and there “are lots of manufacturers that want to sell direct to consumers”.

Too darned right.

Maybe that’s why some of the big heavyweights in our digital planet are getting into payments, with Apple rumoured to be offering iTunes accounts as a method of payment for digital downloads on third party websites.

Similarly Facebook has often been mooted as thinking about getting into more commercial activities, such as extending their credit system to online payments, as have Twitter.

All in all, PayPal does have competition so they’re not alone out there. But, historically, they’ve always managed to keep ahead of the competition. We shall see what happens this time if, and when, the big heavyweights take them on.