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Amazon to Allow Venmo Payments – After the Holidays

By Laura Tucker
Venmo On Amazon Featured

There’s no denying payments have changed in the past few decades. Much of that is because of advancements in technology. The most recent change, however, seems to have more to do with convenience than anything else. It was announced this week that Amazon would start accepting Venmo payments – but not in time for Black Friday or the holiday season.

PayPal Announces Amazon Will Accept Venmo Payments

You may be confused by the heading above. What some may not realize is that PayPal is Venmo’s parent company. PayPal acquired Braintree in 2013, one year after Braintree had acquired Venmo. PayPal itself was acquired by eBay in 2002, then broke off from the online auction site in 2015.

PayPal announced on Monday it would “team up with Amazon to allow Venmo’s more than 80 million users in the U.S. to pay with Venmo at checkout using funding methods that include their linked bank account and Venmo balance. Starting next year, customers will be able to make purchases on Amazon.com and the Amazon mobile shopping app in the U.S. using their Venmo accounts.”

Venmo On Amazon Social

This makes Venmo another convenient method for paying for your purchases. Its parent company PayPal is offered as a payment method at several online merchants. It does lead to the question of why PayPal didn’t grab up the Amazon option for itself, instead leaving it to its more social spinoff, when Amazon isn’t considered a social shopping site.

Venmo did a behavior study recently that showed 65 percent of its users reported increasing their online buying during the pandemic, with 47 percent admitting they were interested in using Venmo to pay at merchants. It’s been increasing the places and ways it could be used, and working with Amazon should increase that figure exponentially.

“Over the last year, we have focused on giving our Venmo community more ways to use Venmo in their daily lives,” said Senior Vice President and GM Darrell Esch of Venmo, “including the ability to pay with QR codes and providing more shopping features like purchase protection. We’re thrilled to make it possible for our users and Amazon customers to pay with Venmo starting next year.”

Venmo On Amazon Shopping

Added the director of Global Payment Acceptance at Amazon, Ben Volk, “We understand our customers want options and flexibility in how they make purchases on Amazon. We’re excited to team up with Venmo and give our customers the ability to pay by using their Venmo accounts, providing new ways to pay on Amazon.”

How Does the Social Aspect Fit In?

Venmo has traditionally been thought of more as a social payment structure. It’s a way for friends to send payments to their friends. PayPal can be used the same way but has many more responsibilities. Zelle is kind of a merger of the two, as a way to pay your bills and send money to friends.

But that opens up the question of why Venmo customers have been clamoring to pay for their purchases with the service. Perhaps they are looking for one service to do it all for them.

Venmo On Amazon Zelle

I myself have had PayPal since my days of using eBay, then picked up Venmo as the only way to pay the palm reader on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. I picked up Zelle to make payments to my sister. I signed on with Apple Pay as my preferred online option. Having just one service that would do it all would definitely make it easier, though I’m not much interested in the social aspect and would probably still prefer to use credit card payments on Amazon.

If you’re interested in using Venmo on Amazon starting in 2022, learn how to make it private and protect your privacy. If you’re not interested in Venmo, take a look at these PayPal alternatives.

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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