Amazon FPS: Flexible Payment Service
Amazon’s Flexible Payment Service (FPS)
is a system for the transferring of monies between any 2 individuals or
companies with Amazon payment accounts. As well as allowing developers
to create their own payment systems, vendors can delegate their payment
processing to Amazon, which should be of some interest to micro ISVs.
When it comes to the trust stakes, having a co-branded payment page
must be up there. I can’t remember a Word Wide Web without Amazon.
Overview
FPS allows payments to be configured and prepared in 3 steps:
- A set of rules can be defined to configure which criteria must be met for a payment to go ahead.
- The parties agree to the rules and approve the transaction.
- FPS performs the transaction.
There are 3 actors in a transaction, the caller, the sender and the recipient.
The caller is the actor who orchestrates the whole
transaction. She is responsible for obtaining the authorisations from
both the sender and the recipient. The caller must call the FPS APIs,
so must also have an FPS developer account.
The sender is the actor who is making a payment.
She will send money from any sources associated with her Amazon payment
account, whether it be a credit card, bank account or Amazon Payments
balance.
The recipient, for our purposes, the micro ISV, is the actor that receives the money. The balance of the transaction is added to the recipient’s Amazon payment account.
There are 4 types of Amazon Payment Account:
Personal accounts are generated automatically for
users when they first make a payment through FPS. Accounts are
initially restricted to payments by credit card, but can be enhanced
(with a confirmed email address) to include paying directly from a bank
account, and receiving payments from any source other than credit cards.
Business account have all the benefits of an
enhanced personal account, but with the added benefit of being able to
receive credit card payments.
Developer accounts are similar to Business accounts but allow for API access too.
Ultra accounts are special accounts for users who
have a consistently high volume of transactions. Ultra accounts receive
a discounted rate for credit card transactions.
Pricing
For Transactions >= $10:
- 1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
- 2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
- 2.9% + $0.30 for credit card
Spreading the love – a few 3rd party FPS solutions:
- .netCharge – an ASP.net component backing onto FPS
- You can also create your own widget directly from Amazon
