Amazon has decided to kill its free money transfer service

Sep 13, 2014 15:56 GMT  ·  By

Amazon’s free online money-transfer service called WebPay is getting shut down on October 13, 2014.

As the ecommerce giant decides to close the doors to its service, it means users will no longer be able to send, receive, or request money by using their email address and the Amazon Payments page.

This isn’t exactly a surprise move since Amazon has been hinting at this for the last three months. This week, however, it all became official after the company sent out an email to active Amazon Payments account users telling them that the service would no longer be available in a month’s time.

The user agreement has also been updated to note the elimination of person-to-person payments.

Once the transition is complete, the “Send Money” option will no longer appear after Amazon Payments customers log into their accounts.

“We are addressing a customer pain point particularly better than anyone else. We’ve learned a great deal about how and when customers want to send money and will look for ways to use these lessons in the future,” Amazon said about the shut down.

30 days to accept transfers

If you still want to send money in this manner, you’ll be able to do so until October 13. The service will be available for an extra 30 days for those who are to claim funds. If they are not picked up by the recipient by the time this window closes as well, then the transaction will be automatically cancelled and the funds will be returned to the sender.

The transaction history will still be available to view for customers by going to payments.amazon.com, signing on with their account credentials and clicking “Your Account.” It is unclear, however, for how long this will be possible or whether the company will provide an export feature for those who want to keep such a document on their computers.

So far, Amazon doesn’t offer any alternatives, but that doesn’t mean that it may not look into introducing a new service in the years to come. At this moment, however, this seems to be the end of this road for this type of activity on Amazon’s platforms.

Users have a few more weeks to find another service to trust for such transactions. Google Wallet is one example of service that now allows users to send funds to people through Wallet, moving money from one account to another. There are other similar tools out there as well.