Payments Watch

As anticipated, Amazon has launched its new payment service. Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is being promoted by Amazon as being the “first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers”. It is a set of web services built on top of Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.

At first blush, Amazon’s FPS has some compelling features such as:

• The ability to send and receive money using credit card, bank account or Amazon Payments balance transfer as payment methods.
• Create custom payment instructions to define conditions and constraints desired for a given transaction.
• Create one-time, multiple, or recurring payments on behalf of customers.
• Aggregate many small micro transactions into a single (larger) transaction using prepaid and postpaid capabilities.
• Build payment applications where you are neither the sender nor the recipient of funds, i.e. you can build marketplace applications that enable the movement of money between third parties.
• View account balances, transaction histories, and transaction details on the Amazon Payments Web site.
• Utilize the Amazon FPS sandbox to build and test applications without using real money or incurring any transaction charges.

I hope to look into Amazon’s FPS further. In the meantime, check out the Amazon Payments site!