Amazon Webpay was a feature of Amazon’s payment platform. It was a money transferring tool released by Amazon in 2011. It was much like the popular payment service Venmo and allowed users to pay other people through Amazon.
Webpay was free of cost and enabled users to send, receive, and request payments using their email address from the Amazon Payments webpage.
On the 13th of October 2014, Amazon shut down its Webpay services after leaving some hints about the closure back in June of the same year. Amazon made the announcement by sending emails to all the active Amazon Payment users. In an FAQ posted on Amazon, the reason for shutting down Webpay was its failure to address customers’ requirements in a better way than other services.
Evidently, Amazon didn’t feel that Webpay was making that much of a difference in users’ lives and wanted to focus its efforts elsewhere. The online money transferring market is a competitive one with many major players who have been doing it for years. Examples include popular platforms such as PayPal and Square Cash. Even Google Wallet and Apple Pay had a head start in the mobile-wallet department.
Amazon’s Webpay seemed like a neglected service that never truly saw the light of day. Amazon itself had never emphasized it a lot and focused more on its other offerings. At the time of closure, Amazon was not providing any alternatives to Webpay. This suggests that Amazon completely pulled the plug on its personal money transfer segment and shifted to point of sale solutions for retailers instead.
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