Amazon entering the payment processor market

[Peter]

Amazon have entered the payment processor market and have currently rolled out their service in BETA format.

Amazon FPS Functionality
You can use the extensive feature set of Amazon FPS to conduct a wide variety of transactions under virtually any set of constraints. Key features include:

* Send and receive money using credit card, bank account or Amazon Payments balance transfer as payment methods.
* Create "Payment Instructions" to define conditions and constraints desired for a given transaction, and programmatically obtain payment authorizations or "tokens" that represent these Payment Instructions from customers.
* Execute one-time, multiple, or recurring payments on behalf of customers.
* Aggregate 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. You can build marketplace applications that enable the movement of money between two 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.

The service is aimed at developers to integrate into their site/application.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2007/08/pay-me-now-or-p.html
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_c...604-5529567?ie=UTF8&node=342430011&no=3435361

 

[dhscott]

Promising. They already have a proven record with their own payment system.

The fees:

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

For Transactions < $10:

* 1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers
* 2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits
* 5.0% + $0.05 for credit card

For Amazon Payments balance transfers < $0.05:

* 20% of the transaction amount, with a minimum fee of $0.0025

Qualified developers can apply for the following monthly volume discounts for credit card transactions:

* 2.5% + $0.30 per transaction for payment volume from $3K- $10K
* 2.2% + $0.30 per transaction for payment volume from $10K - $100K
* 1.9% + $0.30 per transaction for payment volume over $100K

Looks good!

 

[billinchina]

I got excited about the micropayments for a minute until I started looking into it. It looks like you can only group micropayments into one payment on a per user basis. So, you could group 10 micropayments from Bob and then only process one payment for Bob. However, it looks to me like you can't take a micropayment from Bill, John, Bob and Sally and combine them into one payment.

If some company can figure out how to take micropayments from Visa and Mastercard across multiple users/cards, it would be cool.

 

[Peter]

If some company can figure out how to take micropayments from Visa and Mastercard across multiple users/cards, it would be cool.

That would be way too costly to be honest. Regardless of the size of the company they still have to pay credit card fees and if you were only for example taking 50 cent from each user you would be lucky to see 1/2 of that. The usual way to take such payments is by utilizing premium rate numbers or to use reverse sms messages (where the person is charged for receiving the message).