The Payment wars are heating up (or Here comes the Q3 craziness!)

Things have been really quiet this July, but here we are at August first and its time for everyone in ecommerce-land to wake up and get cracking for the Q4 rush.

In that spirit there are several interesting announcements/leaks around the payment wars.

First, TechCrunch reports that Amazon is working on a payment system in the vein of Google Checkout (e.g. it will be a checkout system you can put on a merchant's site, vs. just sitting next to visa/mc/amex).  This is also how Paypal Express works.
Next, since raising a whopping $640m in debt financing last year, BillMeLater IPO rumors are swirling around.  Nobody knows their volume, but the speculation is that they are as large/larger than PayPal's off-ebay (merchant) business.  BML certainly is on a lot of merchants out there and is making moves to come further down to the SMB level.

Some interesting questions: 

1. Will eBay allow amazon checkout/payment system for eBay purchases (I'm guessing it's probably not proven or secure, just like gcheckout).
2. Also, a reporter asked me which one processes more: Paypal or Amazon's payment system?

Here's some quickly math from the eBay and Amazon Q207 reports.  All math is quarterly:

eBay:

• PayPal Global TPV: $11.69B - $4.92 off-ebay (merchant services)

Amzn:

• $2.89b Global Net Sales
• Amazon's net sales isn't the same as TPV/GMV because it includes 100% of the GMV for Amazon sourced goods, but only the TAKE RATE (approx 15%) for third-parties.  Amazon doesn't break that out, but they do say that 30% of orders are third parties.
• If we really swag this (the number is too high because we don't know the ASP and not counting for the fact that 30% of the orders have 15% of the revenue counted), you can get Amazon TPV of about $4-5b

So the answer is: If you count all of Paypal's TPV, they are 2-3X ahead, if you look at just off-ebay, Amazon isn't that far off.

I have a sneaking suspicion there are some more payment announcements on the horizon so stay tuned! ;-)

Comments

[Cullen]

Thank you very much for this easy to follow guide, it was very usefull.
http://www.rapidsharemix.com

[John Beck]

New e commerce segments have been reactivated through different stores as eBay and amazon resulting in gaining consumer confidence .

[gone2deriver]

"I have a sneaking suspicion there are some more payment announcements on the horizon so stay tuned! ;-)"

A Google Developer with loose lips has been saying that some exciting upgrades are coming to checkout.....

Bottom line the more competition the better!

[Scott Hurff]

Here's my take on it over at CSE Strategies:
http://www.csestrategies.com/cse/2007/08/amazon-to-take-.html