One of Amazon's most 'underappreciated' businesses is already way ahead of Apple and Google (AMZN)

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Amazon Payments, the e-commerce company's payments service that competes with PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Wallet, already owns a sizeable market share and may be its most "underappreciated" business, according to RBC Capital's managing director Mark Mahaney.

Speaking at Business Insider's Ignition conference on Wednesday, Mahaney said Amazon Payments is showing a lot of potential to "disrupt" the payments space, and perhaps, could become the next big revenue driver for the company.

"I think Amazon’s ability to disrupt payments is vastly underappreciated," Mahaney said.

Mahaney's thinking is based on data from ChannelAdvisor, a leading e-commerce software maker that publishes quarterly data on the general market. As seen in the chart below, 15% of the market cited Amazon Payments as the most preferred payments method after credit card, only trailing PayPal, and coming in way ahead of Apple and Google's competing products.

David Ryder/Getty Images

Amazon Payments enables customers to pay through their Amazon accounts while shopping on other e-commerce sites, saving them the hassle of entering their credit card and shipping info again. Since its launch, the product has gotten thousands of sites on board, but with only a few big names — like the inflight Internet service Gogo — making the list. 

In April, Amazon Payments launched a new Global Partner Program which allows e-commerce platform providers to easily integrate its service. TechCrunch reported at the time that Amazon has 285 million account holders, with over 23 million of them having paid through their accounts on other sites.

Still, Mahaney said it's unclear if Amazon Payments will be able to catch up to PayPal and become the de facto paying platform. Payments in general is not a completely underserved market, and Amazon may decide to invest more on growing other initiatives, like its grocery delivery or shipping logistics businesses.

"The one challenge here to whether this really becomes the fourth pillar for Amazon is that it’s already a reasonably efficiently served market," Mahaney said.

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