If you want to buy anything on Amazon.com, you’ll generally need a credit or debit card — but in 2022, the online retailer will begin accepting Venmo as well. Venmo parent company PayPal announced the news (via GeekWire) during its Q3 earnings call on Monday.
We’re pretty sure that’s the first third-party payments platform Amazon has embraced in recent memory. You can’t use PayPal itself to buy things on Amazon! (Here’s a list of the payment methods Amazon does accept as of today). You might cite Amazon’s recent buy-now, pay-later partnership with Affirm, but that still requires credit. Venmo, by comparison, acts more like a bank account for some mobile users, complete with a (sometimes expensive) check-cashing feature.
Details on the Amazon partnership are scarce right now, but if you’ve got a US Venmo account, PayPal says you’ll be able to use it to make purchases at both Amazon’s website and its mobile app starting in 2022, and you’ll be able to use either your Venmo balance or a linked bank account to pay. The company didn’t provide a more specific timeframe or any details about how those transactions might work, saying on the earnings call that PayPal was “still working” with Amazon on the details.
It’s possible that Amazon will surface it as a full-fledged payment mechanism by offering an entire Pay with Venmo option, or it’s possible it will try to maintain more control by requiring you to integrate Venmo with its own Amazon Wallet. (Maybe you’ll have to deposit Venmo money into your Amazon balance first?)
Venmo, like PayPal, recently added support for popular cryptocurrencies. It’s not clear if that will allow you to effectively purchase Amazon items with cryptocurrency, though.
On PayPal’s Q3 earnings call, the company stated that while the PayPal portion is still larger than Venmo, the Venmo business has now grown as large as the entire PayPal US footprint.
