Amazon.com recently jumped into the merchant service, transaction and ecommerce tools for small business, business under the banner of Amazon Payments.

The new services come in a variety of flavors and are aimed directly at the current undisputed leader – PayPal.com. Now PayPal is miles ahead but Amazon’s got some things no other merchant services offering does – Amazon has a trusted brand and it’s got product to put in the mix.

Any business that uses their services automatically can add, upsell and cross-sell the entire Amazon product mix from the same set of tools and I think that’s a big plus.

The offering starts with Simply Pay – the basic, put a link on your site and collect money through their system (any Amazon account holder won’t have to put account info in!)

Next up is Checkout – this is Amazon’s shopping cart offering with integrated payment and, again, the ability to add Amazon product with an Amazon Associates cut.

Don’t forget about Amazon Fulfillment too – Amazon will hang onto your product and fill and ship orders for you through the shopping cart and payment system essentially automating the entire sales fulfillment process.

Lastly we have Amazon’s developer offering called Flexible Payments – this is the tool developers can start using to make their processing scripts work with Amazon’s payment system. This is where I think they will see some great growth. Lots of 3-party software will be able to hook onto the system in pretty short order because Amazon does a better job with developers than PayPal has in the past.