As most now know, eBay/PayPal acquired BillMeLater earlier this year to augment their growing payments business (and likely to head off a potential competitor before it got too large).

At the time of the acquisition, BillMeLater was an integrated payment method at Amazon.com.  Amazon.com announced today in Seller Central, however, that they will no longer support this payment method.

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Notice: BillMeLater no longer accepted as of December 31, 2008
Dec 30, 2008

Effective December 31st, 2008, BillMeLater (BML) will no longer be accepted as a payment method on Amazon.com. All sales and orders processed with BillMeLater prior to this date will continue to be processed; no changes are needed for these existing orders. Buyers and sellers can continue to use the remaining payment methods available on Amazon.com for future orders. _______________________________________________________________________________

While we assume eBay equally assumed this removal would occur when contemplating the acquisition, the real question is the amount of payment volume, customer acquisition, and brand awareness this Amazon.com relationship drove to BillMeLater.  Also, note the speedy removal of BillMeLater and short notice period.  It’s possible eBay could have assumed a bit more of a tailwind depending on the contractual terms between Amazon.com and BillMeLater.

Expect continued innovations, maneuvers, and fighting for transaction and payment volume between these two eCommerce giants in 2009!

Amazon frequently deals itself a good hand. Examples off the top of my head are Kindle, AmazonMP3 and the sticky customer shipping service, Amazon Prime.

However, I have to vote this a missed deal. First, turning on the sound will have sound blaring out at you before you’ve had a chance to absorb the picture, which is completely and totally annoying. Navigation is performed with your arrow keys – So if you happen to stop on a book, they start reading before you can absorb the books title and determine if you want to hear more. Additionally, all product types are mashed together. Thus if you are shopping for new releases in DVD, you’ll have to arrow past a plethora of book and music categories.

I’d love to know what you think about this new beta feature – maybe its ME that missing the brilliance here!

One of our senior developers recently returned from a trip to the Amazon and other points in South America. When I dorkilishiously asked if she escaped the pythons and piranha and crocodiles, she politely explained that they’re actually more scared of us than we should be of them. “The most dangerous animal there,” she said, “is the mosquito!”

Ironically, the Vendio team is simultaneously wrapping up our software coding to enable sellers to manage their Amazon.com sales through the same inventory and order management system (OMS) that currently supports their Vendio Hosted Stores, Google Checkout, and eBay sales. As we work through this project, indeed, it hasn’t been the big animals that proved difficult, but the little “mosquitoes” that can get you. We hope to have removed all of these by launch so you don’t have to worry about them, but we wanted to give you some of the high level differences you can expect between selling on eBay and Amazon.com.

Catalog, catalog, catalog

A great majority of the items you’ll sell on Amazon.com will already be on the site from some other seller, including Amazon.com itself. In these cases, you simply map your item to the catalog and give some additional details about your particular item (e.g. pricing, condition). Your item will then appear near other purchase opportunities on the Amazon product page. You won’t need to worry about titles and descriptions as much, but you will need to follow the competition and pricing more carefully. Even in cases where you introduce a new sales item on Amazon.com, realize it will also largely look like an Amazon.com page. No fancy templates allowed here.

Payment flow

On eBay, a buyer commits to purchase and item and pays through your preferred payment method before you ship the item. On Amazon.com, the flow is slightly different. Amazon.com collects payment through the checkout experience on your behalf and commits to pay you when you confirm delivery (essentially delayed capture for credit cards in your merchant account). Therefore, it becomes imperative for you to mark items as shipped in Vendio order management system (also known as post-sale). This event triggers us to mark the item as shipped within Amazon.com’s system on your behalf, which is their cue to release the funds to you. While it sounds a bit scary to ship before you have cash in the bank, realize large sellers have been processing orders from Amazon.com in this way for quite some time. The process will be relatively seamless for you in the Vendio system.

No Listing Fees

As many know, Amazon takes no fee to list an item on the Amazon.com platform. There are some monthly fees for various levels of sellers and of course a final value (success) fee of between 6% and 15%, which includes their payment processing.

As we get closer to launching our support for Amazon.com listings, we’ll be providing additional training materials, webinars, and white papers to help you sell effectively on what for many of you will be a new channel. For those already using Amazon.com, let us know immediately so we can ensure we plan to help you individually consolidate these sales in one system!