According to a story in Roll Call, Amazon will provide a means, starting Thursday, for you to make a direct donation to your favorite presidential candidate using your Amazon account. Amazon apparently worked out a deal with each campaign over the last month. The cost of developing the program and the processing fees are being paid by the presidential campaigns. Many will see the benefit to the presidential campaigns, but there's an upside for Amazon as well.

This is an interesting example of Amazon exerting its transaction processing muscle in ways that go beyond books and other merchandise. Clearly, Amazon's position as one of the premiere merchants on the Web is undisputed, but this build upon that and plays to the "Amazon as platform" strategy which make Amazon a competitor in the payments and transactions space. I wonder how much longer it will be before they federate their ID system and allow other Web sites to let me log in using my Amazon credentials.