Amazon To Pull The Plug On Its Mobile Wallet

It seem Amazon has decided to jump out of the payments business less than a year after first jumping in.

Amazon has announced its intention to discontinue the Amazon Wallet beta program earlier today (January 21).

“We have learned a great deal from the introduction of the Wallet and will look for ways to apply these lessons in the future as we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers,” Amazon spokesman Tom Cook said in a statement.

Amazon has not definitively said whether their attempt at the mobile wallet will ride again.  Going forward, users will still be able to use any gift, loyalty or membership cards stored on the app, but wallet balances will no longer be updated after today, leaving it to users to do so on their own.

Amazon is the latest causality of a mobile commerce ecosystem that is predicted to ignite year after year – by  2019, consumers are are projected to conduct $142 billion in transactions via mobile-payments services, up from $52 billion in 2014, according to Forrester Research – but never seems to.

Google’s payments offering has been available to consumers since 2009, but it has made little headway with consumers.  Apple Pay, which launched to great fanfare and immediately racked up over a million consumer downloads, is now struggling to get consumers to use those Apple Pay accounts.  This largely stems from the fact that most merchants still don’t take NFC, which both Apple and Google rely on.

Amazon never got as far as enabling checkout at the point of sale with its mobile wallet offering – it was for gift cards only in its beta edition.  Now it seems it never will.