Amazon Payments Taken Out of Beta

Amazon takes payments service out of beta

Amazon Payments, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced the General Availability of Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) and the launch of Amazon FPS Quick Starts.

Amazon FPS Quick Starts aggregate various Amazon FPS APIs into a simplified set of APIs that substantially reduce the steps a developer must take to enable transaction processing on their websites. Now, developers can enable common payment transactions such as one time payments, recurring payments and pre-payments in hours rather than days.

Amazon FPS is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable infrastructure and allows developers to accept payments from Amazon's tens of millions of customers.

Starting today, developers who sign up for Amazon FPS by March 15th and launch their applications by June 1, 2009 can take advantage of free payment processing for the first 90 days until total transaction volume reaches $500,000. To learn more about Amazon FPS, Amazon FPS Quick Starts, and the free processing promotion, visit amazonpayments.com/fps.

Amazon FPS Quick Starts include:

* Basic Quick Start enables one-time payments for e-commerce and digital goods, donations, and any other online service.
* Advanced Quick Start provides periodic or delayed payment features required by subscription and usage-based services such as digital music and online storage. Advanced Quick Start offers developers flexibility in specifying payment instructions by time period, amount, and frequency. For example, a user can make recurring payments for a specific amount at regular intervals or a sender might set a spending limit per week for a particular named recipient.
* Marketplace Quick Start is designed for building marketplace applications. Developers can facilitate transactions between a third party buyer and seller, take a cut of the transaction, and have control over who pays the transaction processing fees.
* Aggregated Payments Quick Start reduces processing costs by consolidating multiple transactions, including micro-payments, into a single, larger transaction. This Quick Start offers prepaid and postpaid mechanisms to aggregate transactions. You can enable your customers to create prepaid balances that can be used subsequently to make multiple smaller purchases on your web site or you can extend credit and charge them later for accrued usage. In both cases, the Aggregated Payments Quick Start enables you to programmatically track individual transactions and the aggregated amount.
* Account Management Quick Start simplifies integrating account activity, balance and transaction information into websites and existing applications.

"Developers have been excited about the flexibility that Amazon FPS offers and the wide range of innovative business cases it enables. Developers have asked us for an easier way to get started and tools that would enable them to make the most of the Amazon FPS feature set. This release incorporates this feedback by introducing Amazon FPS Quick Starts, which significantly simplifies integration while maintaining all the flexibility that Amazon FPS provides," said Mark Stabingas," General Manager of Amazon Payments. "Developers can now choose the Amazon FPS Quick Start that meets their unique business needs and monetize their innovations quickly."

"SocialGold's objective is to make it really simple and easy for users to buy currencies and goods in online games and social applications. Amazon FPS Quick Starts provide the most logical and easy-to-use interface we've seen," said Vikas Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO of Jambool, a virtual economy platform for online games. "With Amazon Quick Starts we could quickly zero in on the API we needed. The documentation is great, the API is lightweight and we believe Amazon FPS Quick Starts will be instrumental in helping us create a great experience for our users."

"Meetup is a worldwide network of local, offline groups," said Maya Voskoboynikov, Group Product Manager for Meetup. "By integrating with Amazon FPS, we are helping Meetup Groups develop their own economies in the form of membership dues, event tickets and sponsorship payments. Helping Meetup Groups grow their economies is key to supporting the growth of long lasting organizations. We chose Amazon FPS for its flexible and powerful API, which allowed us to build several custom solutions from one basic foundation."

"We needed to support hundreds of thousands of merchants across a vast network of boutique marketplaces," said Matthew Trifiro, CEO of 1000 Markets. "Amazon FPS was the only system capable of giving us a robust checkout experience across our network. We looked at other payment systems available and chose Amazon FPS because Amazon is the most trusted name in e-commerce and that leads to more sales."

Source: Amazon Payments, 06 February 2009

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