What’s in Amazon’s Wallet? Nothing anymore.

Amazon Wallet, an Android app that Amazon.com developed to store loyalty and gift card information, was supposed to be the e-tail giant’s entry point into mobile payments when the beta was launched six months ago. It wasn’t — and earlier this week Amazon pulled Wallet from its app store and the Google Play store.

In an email statement to media outlets, Amazon wrote, "We’ve learned a great deal from the Amazon Wallet beta program and will look for ways to apply these lessons in the future as we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers."

According to TechCrunch, the Amazon Wallet beta seemed doomed from the outset. The app received an average 3.1 stars out of five among reviewers who complained about its limitations and performance issues. While the app could load loyalty and gift card information, it didn’t have a feature to store credit and debit cards.

Mobile payments has become an area of increased interest among a wide variety of parties including Apple, Google, Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), PayPal, Starbucks and others. According to Forrester Research, via CNET, consumers are expected to conduct roughly $142 billion mobile payment transactions in 2019, up from $52 billion last year.

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Discussion Questions

Where do you think Amazon went wrong with its mobile Wallet service? Do you expect the company to learn from this experience and take a shot at mobile payments again?

Poll

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Max Goldberg
Max Goldberg
9 years ago

Consumers seem to be gravitating towards wallet apps that are native to mobile devices—Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Even with these apps being available to millions of consumers, retailers have been slow to adopt the technology necessary for consumers to use them. I expect Amazon will learn from its wallet’s beta launch and will bring it back once the technology is more widely accepted and used. Failure in the tech space is not as stigmatized as it is in brick-and-mortar. If there is money to be made, or if there is consumer data to be gathered, Amazon will be a player.

Tom Redd
Tom Redd
9 years ago

They tried to link it to drones. Everything is about drones. It is FRIDAY. Will they learn from it? Dah. Try again? No way. Focused on drones …

Ryan Mathews
Ryan Mathews
9 years ago

The answer is simple—it didn’t work as well as alternative payment methods and certainly offered no overall improvement in payment options for consumers.

The answer to the second question is simpler still—absolutely yes.

Gene Detroyer
Gene Detroyer
9 years ago

I don’t know what went wrong. Isn’t that what beta is for? Amazon either fixes it or determines they do not have a competitive advantage versus the current competition.

Camille P. Schuster, Ph.D.
Camille P. Schuster, Ph.D.
9 years ago

Normally a wallet holds forms of payment—cash and credit cards. If Amazon’s Wallet did not include a form of payment it really was not a wallet, so of course consumers would not be happy. Usually Amazon does a good job of learning from its efforts. If Amazon learns from its trial as well as consumers’ responses to other trials, like Starbucks’ payment system or Apple Pay, the next version will be better. The new version will have to include a method of payment that is secure and compatible with the credit card banks.

Carol Spieckerman
Carol Spieckerman
9 years ago

Props to Amazon for failing somewhat fast and moving on. When it comes to payment options, fragmentation isn’t business-friendly. Amazon’s opt-out tightens things up a bit in this space.

Mohamed Amer
Mohamed Amer
9 years ago

Amazon’s beta mobile wallet service appeared to be an initial step to a mobile wallet but with insufficient capabilities to be taken seriously. You can load gift and loyalty cards but credit and debit cards were not included. It was a partial storage device and not a payment wallet. The reviews on Amazon were devastating: “Doesn’t work with the Fire phone.” Users expected more integration and payment capability in addition to retailer adoption.

Of course Amazon will learn from this beta launch and expect if they do another that it will be a more fully-functioning mobile payment, because the real lesson learned here is that consumers are not going to tolerate half-baked solutions to imaginary problems.

Mark Burr
Mark Burr
9 years ago

“We’ve learned a great deal from the Amazon Wallet beta program and will look for ways to apply these lessons in the future as we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers.”

Get in, learn, if it works—great. If it doesn’t, get out.

There is no question, they’ll take what they learned and find the best way to innovate on behalf of their customers just as they said.

If you’re failing it makes no sense to stay. Others might flail around much, much longer—not Amazon.

Experience is important. Amazon knows it. The whole thing may have worked technologically, but it’s about the experience.

“Innovate on behalf our our customers.” They get it. Next …

Craig Sundstrom
Craig Sundstrom
9 years ago

By some small coincidence, Monday’s word-of-the-day was “ultracrepidarian”(adjective: Giving opinions beyond one’s area of expertise).

Similar can be said of many of Amazon’s efforts: poor quality goods or okay quality but little demand. It’s of course true that successful companies may have defeats among their victories, but there’s danger in accepting the non-sequitur that if success is accompanied by failure, failure must be accompanied with success…it isn’t.

Shep Hyken
Shep Hyken
9 years ago

Amazon had an average rating. Average won’t win. There’s mobile payment apps from Apple, Google and eventually others that are competing for market share—or should I say wallet share. There may or may not be room for more than one and competition will be strong. I see a VHS versus BetaMax battle happening. The most “customer focused” and easiest-to-use app will win.

Christina Ellwood
Christina Ellwood
9 years ago

I think Camille hit the nail on the head—wallets are for payments. No payments, it’s not a wallet and not valuable. Betas are for learning, so the next rounds should reflect the lessons learned.