Amazon’s PayPhrase to Speed Checkout

By  |  Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 12:56 am

amazonlogoAmazon on Wednesday rolled out its latest effort to simplify shopping on its site with a service called PayPhrase. Essentially, customers would set up a specific phrase and PIN which would be linked to shipping and billing information on Amazon. When used, the checkout process could potentially be shortened to a matter of seconds.

PayPhrase won’t be limited to just the online retailer. It plans to offer the service to other retailers as well. So far DKNY, Jockey, Patagonia, Buy.com, J&R, and Car-Toys have signed on with the service. Other sites that use Checkout by Amazon would also be able to employ the PayPhrase service, it said.

The nation’s largest online retailer sees this as a big boon for the holidays, where speed is a benefit for shoppers with long Christmas lists.

Is Amazon on to something however with PayPhrase? I think so. Even online methods of payment like PayPal still require several steps to complete a transaction. This requires only two steps: entering the phrase, click, enter PIN, click, done. You can’t get much easier than that while still staying secure.

What remains to be seen however is whether Amazon can drum up more support for this platform. Besides itself, the only other partner with significant market share is Buy.com: that’s way too little reach. If it can manage to snag say two or three more big name partners, PayPhrase may become the next big thing in online payments.

 
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2 Comments For This Post

  1. Scared Witless Says:

    I found this “feature” on my Amazon acct today and immediately emailed them:

    Will you please immediately deactivate PayPhrase for my account.
    I refuse to be held responsible for any purchase made using any Payphrase.
    Please do not issue any “pre-assigned” anything on my account, ever.
    Please do not make any changes to the security of my account, personal, and financial information security without notifying me in advance and making any change an “opt-in” and not an “opt-out”.
    What are you people thinking?

  2. Chuck Says:

    Seems like this would make things easier to mess with people, Don’t get me wrong, The scammers wouldn’t know your credit card number or address, but couldn’t they just attempt a number of pin’s on a phrase and order random items to be sent? Seems like someone could easily do some cookie stuffing through an amazon aphiliate program and make a bunch of bogus purchases and make money before anyone is the wiser..