Look out, PayPal! Here comes Checkout by Amazon

It seems like the battle between eBay and Amazon continues to heat up as Amazon is putting some serious marketing muscle behind the promotion of its Checkout by Amazon solution this holiday season.

For Amazon Rewards credit card holders, they are offering 3X points for shopping with its Checkout partners. This 3X benefit is usually reserved only for purchases made on the Amazon.com. So, that's quite an offer if you have the credit card.

PayPal and Amazon both have large customer databases. And as social network sites such as Facebook and Foursquare have their "connect" APIs to link your social networking profiles to other online properties, it's interesting to see Amazon take its customer relationships and extend it to other e-commerce properties.

It is cool that it integrates your Amazon profile information. For example, one does not need to re-enter one's Amazon.com Rewards Card account number. It can access shipping addresses in my Amazon.com account. Plus it offers Amazon's A-to-z guarantee, which is great for lesser known merchants I may shop at this holiday.

It would be fascinating to see if they can analyze any of this data to inform their own marketing, which already is very data-informed! But I'm not holding my breath as there are privacy concerns with sharing credit card data and their online merchant partners (some are probably competitors) wanting to give that up.

But as a consumer, I hate having logins for all the various e-commerce sites I shop at. And during the holiday season, I may find that special gift at an online merchant that I don't normally shop at. So it's great to login with my Amazon credentials and not have to setup a new account!

And who doesn't have an Amazon account already?

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