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Comment by qqtt | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty wild that Amazon is playing "catch up" at all. Amazon Pay was launched years before Stripe was even founded. Not to mention Amazon has been at the forefront of online payments since the 90s (Amazon itself was founded 4 years before PayPal).

There is some dogma that Amazon is peerless at building platforms and developing APIs, but this is a pretty big failure to capture the market given a huge head start.

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I don't see how this is a failure at all. Amazon Pay and Stripe are not competitors. Amazon Pay is a customer-facing service that makes it easier for customers to enter their credit card information and use it across multiple websites. Stripe is the backend service that processes those payments for on financial networks.

This announcement is about these services coexisting, not about them competing.

Amazon Pay *NOW* is just a customer-facing service, but originally it was envisioned as a PayPal/Stripe type service for transferring money. It has evolved greatly over the years, and in the years before Stripe was even founded it was attempting to compete with PayPal (and ultimately what ended up being Stripe as well).

For example, here is the original press release for FPS: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2007/08/02/amazon...

I do see the Amazon Pay evolution (especially this expanded partnership with Stripe) as a distinct failure to capture the payment market.

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