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Amazon Wallet
Amazon is pulling its Amazon Wallet beta app after an unsuccessful six month test period.
The retail giant launched its Amazon Wallet mobile payment app towards the end of July last year. Even for a beta it was pretty feature-light at launch.
All its US-based users could do was access their loyalty and gift card information on it. There was no facility to store credit or debit card information, which obviously meant that you couldn't make mobile payments through it.
It seems as if Amazon has struggled to initiate its first full mobile payment system. The company began notifying customers on Tuesday that it would be shutting down the Wallet beta and removing the Amazon Wallet app from app stores.
"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," said Amazon spokesman Tom Cook, as reported by CNET.
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There's no news as yet on Amazon's future plans for mobile payments, or whether the Amazon Wallet app has been scrapped for good. For now, users will still be able to use loyalty, gift, and membership cards stored on the app. Wallet balances will no longer be updated as of Wednesday, however.
So far, the promise of mobile payments has not come to pass. Efforts like Google Wallet and even Apple Pay have been persistently repelled or inhibited by either consumer apathy or the intervention of powerful banking institutions unwilling to grant tech companies a slice of this lucrative pie.