The tolls part may still be in the future, but coming very soon you will be able to pay for parking at ParkingCarma enabled garages and private driveways with your Amazon.com account. This means not having to enter your billing information at yet another merchant’s website (ours) and you get the brand name, security, and robustness on which Amazon.com has built their reputation.
The new Amazon.com service called, Amazon Flexible Payments Service, allows users to pay for merchandise and services through any Amazon.com payment method that they have already setup. A user can pay for services using their credit card on file, bank account, Amazon.com credit, and even Amazon.com gift cards. Now you can give the perfect gift of Parking Karma with a gift card in conjunction with Amazon.com and ParkingCarma.
Back to paying for tolls with Amazon.com. Many cities are currently experimenting with a single payment system for all of their transit systems. The city of San Francisco is rolling out their TransLink program for buses and ferries. The Washington D.C. WMETA is using smart cards for their transit system’s, rail, bus, and parking. (see a partial list here: http://www.apta.com/research/info/briefings/briefing_6.cfm)
Some of these organizations are paying millions of dollars to design and implement basically the same general backend payment systems over and over again for each of these implementations. Think of the up-front money that could be saved by just implementing a system like Amazon.com or even Google Checkout to handle the payment instead. By using an open platform 3rd-party payment network, these various systems could eventually even handle the tricky task of splitting money between municipalities.
Thoughts? Comments?
Check back soon for the launch of Amaz.com payments on ParkingCarma.
Thanks,
Christian
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