Amazon is billing Checkout by Amazon as a complete e-commerce checkout solution that provides small business customers a secure and trusted checkout experience. It offers features like Amazon 1-Click, as well as tools for businesses to manage shipping charges, sales tax, promotions and post-sale activities like refunds, cancellations and chargebacks.

The second service , Amazon Simple Pay, is a set of payment-only products that allow a small merchant's customers to use payment information from their Amazon.com account as a payment method on the merchant's Web site.

Checkout by Amazon

Checkout by Amazon promises low friction for Amazon customers. Customers can use the information from their Amazon.com account and other Web sites powered by Amazon.com to complete purchases on the merchant's Web site without having to re-enter their shipping address or payment information. Checkout by Amazon also provides the familiar Amazon.com checkout experience.

Checkout by Amazon can identify Amazon.com customers shopping on the merchant's Web site and offer them Amazon's 1-Click experience, and also makes way for merchants to upsell products within the checkout pipeline. Merchants can even earn Amazon.com association commissions for upselling Amazon products during checkout.

Checkout by Amazon provides tools to view, edit, settle, and cancel orders; search orders by date; download orders in a text file; and print shipping labels and packing slips. And merchants can co-brand the checkout pipeline hosted by Amazon Payments with their own logo.

Amazon Tries To Keep It Simple

As its name suggests, Amazon Simple Pay is a simplified payment system . Unlike Checkout by Amazon, it does not provide capabilities to support real-time shipping and tax calculation, promotions, and order management-tasks including order cancellations, order reports and shipment tracking. However, merchants can use Amazon Simple Pay to enable payments, donations and marketplace transactions.

There are three tiers of service. Amazon Simple Pay Standard enables merchants to offer Amazon Payments as a stand-alone payment method or have it integrated into an existing checkout experience. Amazon Simple Pay Donations are an easy-to-use and secure way for U.S.-based, IRS-certified 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations to collect donations using Amazon Payments.

Amazon Simple Pay Marketplace makes it easy for you to facilitate payments between buyers and sellers, and to charge a fee for the transaction. If you are an e-commerce solution provider, a shopping cart provider, or a marketplace application developer, this is the easiest way for you to facilitate payments between buyers and sellers.