Your Venmo money is now useful for much more than covering your share of last night’s pizza. As promised last year, Amazon is rolling out the option to use either your Venmo balance, a linked bank account or an associated debit card for payments. You can make Venmo the default if you like, and that service’s purchase protection still applies in addition to Amazon’s own safeguards.
The Venmo option is available to some Amazon shoppers today. It should be widely available in the US by Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), the company says. You can add the choice through Amazon’s website or mobile app.
The support doesn’t come as a shock. Venmo has close to 90 million users as of this writing. The new payment choice could encourage that large audience to use Venmo more often in general, especially for shopping. For Amazon, meanwhile, this opens the door to customers who rarely use conventional payment methods.
This Amazon move also comes as PayPal increasingly makes Venmo a catch-all platform. You can use Venmo to pay for Lyft rides, manage cryptocurrency and even cash checks. Now, you can do a large chunk of your online shopping. Venmo still isn’t a full-scale replacement for traditional banking at this stage, but it’s noticeably closer.