Each day seems to bring another amazing story from the world of PayPal, with more and more customers complaining about their conduct and services. Derogatory comments on the internet, an increasing number of outstanding court cases and general customer dissatisfaction seem to be growing.

It seems that this fact has not gone unnoticed by others in the market………….

Amazon are rumoured to be about to introduce their own payment system into the market in the shape of the Amazon Flexible Payments Service. While there has been little word from Amazon about the rumour, the story has quickly grown legs, arms and a head over the last few days! If the rumours are correct, we may be about to see a very interesting three way battle between the likes of PayPal (owned by eBay), Checkout (owned by Google) and the new Amazon system.

Even though there is no argument that PayPal have a very strong stranglehold over the online payments industry, the latest bout of customer unrest could easily play into the hands of their competitors. Like Google in the Search Engine industry, PayPal have gone about their business with little or no real online competitor, slowly building their influence, but what many believe to be their lack of customer service skills may just turn out to be their Achilles heel.

While this recent turn of events may have taken many by surprise, it appears that Amazon have been testing out this new platform for a number of weeks. When you consider with cheap web hosting that amazon are the worlds largest online retailer, their scope to reach out to customers is enormous and offers the potential to open up a very lucrative “side line” for the company. It will be interesting to see how the likes of PayPal and Checkout respond if the rumours do turn out to be true……good times ahead for the consumer!