Amazon WebPay

» see payments.amazon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

amazon webpay was a us-only service at the licensing layer. amazon payments required a us checking account with a us routing number, so the whole peer to peer money side of amazon simply did not open to a turkish account. i had an amazon.com login for kindle purchases from 2010 forward on a turkish credit card, but the peer to peer wing of that same account was never accessible to me from ankara.

amazon launched webpay in 2007 as part of amazon payments, the general account layer that let you buy on merchant sites using your amazon checkout credentials. the peer to peer sub-product was free on both ends. you entered a recipient email address and an amount, with an optional memo. if the recipient had an amazon payments account the funds landed as a balance. if not, they got a claim email with a thirty day window. no transaction fee to either party.

the pitch was that amazon already had tens of millions of us shoppers with billing details on file. paypal owned peer to peer email payments then, backed by the ebay habit that trained a decade of buyers to move money that way. amazon had the account graph plus the fraud tools, and a free tier on top. it should have worked. it did not.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

webpay was engineered as a text-based payments interface that would work over any email client. you could hit an email address from the amazon payments dashboard and the recipient could accept the funds without touching the amazon store front. the api sat quietly next to fps, amazon's flexible payments service for developers. together they were meant to build up a real payments network under the amazon roof, an internal parallel to what paypal had grown up alongside the ebay marketplace.

the problem was that amazon customers did not think of amazon as a place to send money to a friend. they came to buy books and diapers. the peer to peer wing never appeared in the main shopping flow. you had to know to go to payments.amazon.com and dig for it. paypal spent the mid two thousands turning up in every checkout button on the internet and in every ebay auction email. by 2010 venmo was doing the same social layer for younger us users.

~ the fade ~

by 2013 the p2p tier of the payments space was crowded. google wallet had a version. square cash had turned an email address into an atm withdrawal. paypal was still the default. venmo was owned by braintree, then by paypal from december 2013 onward. amazon had not moved webpay into any social loop. it stayed hidden inside the payments dashboard, with no obvious integration to prime or the amazon app.

the shutdown notice went out in early september 2014. the wind-down date was 13 october 2014, so amazon gave webpay users about a month. any transaction started before that date could complete under the old rules. after 13 october the send button was gone. the flexible payments service had already been given the same treatment a few months earlier, with its formal end date arriving in june 2015.

~ what it became ~

amazon left peer to peer alone for a while after webpay closed. the store-side amazon pay product for merchant checkout kept running under the same amazon payments umbrella. that piece is still around in 2026. the p2p pattern went to venmo and cash app, with zelle joining later on the us banking rails. amazon eventually tried again with amazon cash in 2017 and later with alexa-based money transfers, both smaller than the webpay ambition. the 2007 to 2014 window turned out to be the only time amazon tried to compete directly with paypal on the send-money-to-a-friend product.

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