Amazon to adopt its first third-party payment platform Venmo in 2022

If you want to buy something on Amazon.com, you will usually need a credit or debit card, but in 2022, the online retailer will start accepting Venmo as well. Venmo's parent company PayPal announced the news (via GeekWire) during its third-quarter earnings call on Monday.

We're pretty sure it's the first third-party payment platform that Amazon has adopted in recent times. You can't use PayPal to buy things on Amazon! (Here's a list of the payment methods Amazon accepts as of today.) You can cite Amazon's recent buy-now-pay-later partnership with Affirm, but that still requires credit. By comparison, Venmo acts more like a bank account for some mobile users, with a (sometimes expensive) check cashing feature.

Details on Amazon's partnership are scant at this time, but if you have a Venmo account in the US, PayPal says you'll be able to use it to make purchases on both Amazon's website and its mobile app starting in 2022. , and you can use your Venmo balance or a linked bank account to pay. The company did not provide a more specific time frame or details on how those transactions might work, saying in the earnings call that PayPal was "still working" with Amazon on the details.

Amazon may show it as a full payment mechanism by offering a full Pay with Venmo option, or it may try to maintain more control by requiring you to integrate Venmo with your own Amazon Wallet. Maybe you need to deposit money from Venmo to your Amazon balance first. Venmo, like PayPal, recently added support for popular cryptocurrencies. However, it is unclear if that will allow you to effectively purchase Amazon items with cryptocurrencies. In PayPal's Q3 earnings call, the company stated that while PayPal's share is still larger than Venmo's, Venmo's business has now grown as much as PayPal's entire US footprint.