Amazon is Breaking Up With Venmo

Amazon has a history of being surprisingly inflexible with its payment methods. You can pay with a debit or credit card, you can have your bank account charged directly, and you can finance a purchase using Affirm, but it famously doesn’t adopt PayPal or other competing platforms for payments. It did, however, add Venmo as a payment method last year. That’s going away now, though, as Amazon has decided to part ways with PayPal-owned Venmo.

According to a notice on Venmo’s website, the payment app can no longer be used as a payment method at Amazon. Venmo will remain usable for new purchases right up until January 10th, at which point it will be removed for good. In a statement to TechCrunch, a PayPal spokesperson advance confirmed the news, adding that “Venmo and Amazon have agreed to disable Venmo as a payment option to pay on Amazon at this time. Customers can continue to add their Venmo debit card or credit card to their Venmo wallet to pay on Amazon. We have a strong relationship with Amazon and look forward to continuing to build on it.”

While the news might come as a bummer for some, it’s not something that matters a lot in the grand scheme of things. All Venmo users have a debit card attached to the account and some even have a credit card, and those will remain completely usable on Amazon just appreciate you’re able to pay on other websites with them. The only thing that’s going away is the actual integration between Venmo and Amazon, which allowed the retailer to charge your Venmo account directly.

There wasn’t a difference paying from Venmo directly compared to just using one of your cards. It was just there as a more convenient option if you’re one to use Venmo frequently to shop online, or if you wanted Venmo to act as a middleman of sorts so that Amazon wouldn’t get any of your personal information.

Realistically, all you need to do now is to pull out your debit card and enter it into Amazon if your want to continue using Venmo.

Source: TechCrunch