imageI’m fascinated by Amazon’s business strategy. It’s really clever.

* Amazon acquires Audible.com (January 2008)
* Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos invests in Twitter (June 2008) through his personal fund, Bezos Expeditions.
* Kindle sales are 12% of Amazon’s total sales [update: Kindle sales are 12% of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form] (June 2008).

Social retail. Retail on the go. Sales using your Amazon account. Sales via cell. It’s all credit card processing.

And yesterday, Amazon beefed up its payment services by launching Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay.

Why is this clever? Because. Amazon became huge by allowing developers to use their API. To create their own stores.With these payment options, other e-commerce sites can insert an Amazon Checkout cart on their sites. E-commerce is hard. This is easy.

* For the user: One-click ordering for anyone with an existing Amazon account
* For the website owner: Order management, shipping, sales tax calculations and more from a reputable checkout service
* For Amazon: data mining and part of the transaction fee. Transaction fees start at 2.9 percent of the order amount, plus 30 cents per order (unless you’re doing a lot of business). And for transactions less than $10, Amazon charges 5 percent plus 5 cents.

Here’s what I think their new motto is:
Amazon. Solving the Hard Problems.

Payments. Data storage. Cloud computing services. Hello Amazon. You’re not the bookstore I remember. But you’re certainly making money.