> Stripe’s new partnership with Amazon. com Inc., the largest and most sought-after customer on the internet. Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions.
Lots of questions about why Amazon would do something like that. Is it so they have a backup in case their systems go down? Or was Stripe actually able to get better rates than Amazon was, so this will save them money?
Or was Stripe actually able to get better
rates than Amazon was ...
I can say with high confidence that this is not the case. Amazon processes through Paymentech on their Salem platform. Effectively, this is the Stratus side of the house which is optimized for high-volume batch oriented customers.
Since Stripe is an ISO with FDMS, they will always have higher fees than a relationship with an "on-the-rails" bank for merchants with volume anywhere near Amazon.
IMHO, a more likely scenario is that Amazon is looking to acquire Stripe, take over the ISO relationships with their merchants, and leverage from there.
Yup, amazon has been all about acquisitions and broadening their horizons lately. When they acquired twitch, they had regulations put in place first test if things would stick. Then twitch was acquired after. Seems they're probably doing the same with Stripe.
I setup my brother's small business stripe integration, and I wrote and tested the API calls to charge customers. Stripe doesn't know anything about his business except transaction sizes, and a bunch of info they definitely can't resell (TIN) or is already public knowledge (business name, billing address). I doubt they have anything helpful for pricing, though they might be able to analyze gross transaction rates and geography. I have never checked what their contractual obligations are with that data, I imagine if they started sharing it that would get out pretty fast, and result in them losing customers rapidly.
> Stripe’s new partnership with Amazon. com Inc., the largest and most sought-after customer on the internet. Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions.
Lots of questions about why Amazon would do something like that. Is it so they have a backup in case their systems go down? Or was Stripe actually able to get better rates than Amazon was, so this will save them money?