On Tuesday, Amazon announced the launch of two new services, Checkout By Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay, which have been conceived in order to help websites better perform their online transactions.

Checkout By Amazon enables its visitors to sign in to various websites with a previously obtained Amazon Account login and purchase items by simply using the Amazon One-Click button. Checkout brings together the products’ payment, promotion and shipping, thus making business very convenient. Amazon Simple Pay lets customers sign in their Amazon accounts, while Amazon takes care of the payment.

Obviously enough, both services have to be paid for. The charges Amazon has set go as follows: the transaction fee starts up at 2.9 percent of the order, to which 30 cents are added per order; the percentage drops to 1.9 for websites totaling sales of more than $100,000. The transactions that are worth less than $10 are charged 5 percent to which 5 cents are added.

Checkout By Amazon does have some serious competition, namely eBay's PayPal and Google Checkout. PayPal charges are quite similar: they start at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for each transaction, when monthly sales do not exceed $3,000. For monthly sales worth more than $100,000, each transaction is charged 1.9 percent plus 30 cents.

Google Checkout however costs users 2 percent plus 20 cents for each transaction.

Whether or not people will start turning from their familiar PayPal and Google practices to the new services provided by Amazon remains to be seen; one thing is for sure, as competition just got serious, services can only get better and better from here on out.