As mid-size online merchants like Overstock and TigerDirect experiment with bitcoin-based payments, digital retail giant Amazon remains unimpressed. Speaking with Re/Code, Amazon payments head Tom Taylor said that the demand for bitcoin doesn’t match the hype.
Obviously it gets a lot of press and we have considered it, but we’re not hearing from customers that it’s right for them and don’t have any plans within Amazon to engage bitcoin.”
Taylor’s view isn’t entirely surprising. With a current market cap of just under $6 billion, if every bitcoin in existence was spent at Amazon it would barely move the needle on the $74.5 billion yearly earnings seen by Amazon. There’s also very little evidence that significant customer demand exists, as even bitcoiner-favorite Overstock is only generating about $500,000 in monthly bitcoin transactions.
There may also be another factor in play: Amazon may be moving directly into the international payments game. As Taylor told Re/Code:
If we felt like we could do a better job than Amex and Visa, and feel like it helps the customer experience, that’s something we would do. But it would really have to be something much better than [what they do].”
Given the success that eBay has had with their PayPal platform, the growing potential of Google Wallet and the looming entrance of Facebook into the European payments market, it’s entirely possible that Amazon has something of their own in the works.
