It was never about the books.

Jeff Bezos may have launched Amazon as an Internet book seller, but he quickly turned Amazon into an overall ecommerce powerhouse. There's little that Amazon isn't in to these days. Amazon still sells books but it's also one of the leading cloud technology providers via its technology unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which powers both large and small clients all over the world.

Amazon also has a payments division that's ramping very quickly. In 2013, after a couple of starts and stops, the company relaunched its payments division. Amazon Payments gave Amazon customers the ability to pay for products and services on other sites using their Amazon accounts. In a way, early Amazon Payments acted a substitute for PayPal or a credit card when Amazon account holders went shopping online. Amazon said this January that its transaction volume had grown 150 percent year over year in its payment division but hasn't given out a full reckoning of its activities in the payments space.

Integrating Amazon Payments in the ecommerce ecosystem

Like PayPal, Amazon is running the the third party integration playbook as the next leg in its growth. Just this week at a European finance conference, Amazon announced it would enable merchants with the ability to integrate Amazon's payment tools into their own websites.  By giving Amazon customers the ability to log in, authenticate, and pay with their Amazon account, an ecommerce site can offer the same ease and use Amazon is renown for.

This gives Amazon a much broader footprint in payments, as merchants are certainly interested in reaching the nearly 300 million registered users Amazon already has. These customers wouldn't need to re-register or input payment information on merchant partner websites. They could just use their existing Amazon accounts and payment information on file to checkout. In turn, this would speed the conversion cycle and boost revenues for ecommerce sites that integrate Amazon Payments.