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Comment by willlll | Hacker News Reader

> Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Neither company will address the scope of the deal—which was only revealed by Stripe’s addition of Amazon’s logo to its website—but it could help Stripe greatly increase its transaction volume.

So, reading into this, amazon presumably invested in stripe, then gave it some transaction traffic to juice the numbers to make an S-1 look better?

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This is quite interesting. What does Amazon have to gain from using Stripe?

Amazon's overall goal is to take a cut of pretty much every piece of economic activity. Taking a cut off of every payment made on the internet outside of their own stores is an objective greatly aided by a stripe acquisition

You have to look at it from both sides though: If I started a business with Stripe as a processor, it's in Stripe's best interest for my business to grow as much as possible, because the higher my volume, the more they make. They'll want a good cut, but their goal is a long term relationship. It's not the same thing with Amazon: Every piece of intel I give them is an opportunity for them to eat my business.

I guess that if Amazon threw a crazy enough amount of money at them, then sure, everyone has a price, but how is joining Bezos' empire helping them? There's very little synergy in the other direction, so the premium for such an acquisition would have to be very large.

When you put the premium there, along with how being acquired by Amazon makes the competition more attractive, makes me think that something like that is unlikely.

International or some other payment type Amazon doesn't support well or at all in their own payment system seems like the lowest hanging fruit.

Amazon payments seemed like a huge opportunity to me at one point but I think they're sort of moving away from it. This could be a test that could trigger moving all payments to Stripe and eliminating the overhead of their own payments team. Wouldn't shock me.

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