More About Amazon's New Simple Pay Service
Yesterday, we noted that Amazon Payments had launched a new, fully featured ecommerce checkout service called Checkout by Amazon along with a new, payments-only service called Amazon Simple Pay. In this post, we take a deeper look at Amazon Simple Pay - which enables third-party web sites to simply enable existing Amazon.com customers to pay using their Amazon payment information.
- Amazon Simple Pay Standard meets the basic needs of a web site for card-based payments acceptance. You can simply put an Amazon Payments button on your checkout page and customers will be taken to the Amazon Payments website where they can chose how to pay.
- Amazon Simply Pay Donations provides an easy-to-use and secure way for US-based, IRS-certified 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations to collect donations. Again, you simply put up an Amazon Payments donation button on your website and Amazon Payments handles the rest.
- Amazon Simple Pay Marketplace makes it easy to facilitate payments between buyers and sellers, as well as charge a fee for the transaction. For example, here on Payments News we could setup a marketplace area to sell analyst reports. Analysts seeking to sell their reports on Payments News could register to sell them. We'd could then begin publicizing the availability of their reports and use Amazon Simple Pay Marketplace to handle the payments from purchasers while splitting the purchase amount between the analyst while sharing in a commission ourselves.
The capabilities to implement these kinds of services were originally made available when Amazon launched the Flexible Payment Service just about a year ago. But FPS is a particularly complicated web service. With Amazon Simple Pay, Amazon Payments has made it much simpler for third parties to leverage Amazon's base of users for payments on their web sites. A comprehensive FAQ on Amazon Simple Pay is also available.
Unfortunately, not available for non-US businesses. This seems to be a problem with many of Amazon's business offerings. You'd think that payments would be easy enough to set up with international capability. After all, paypal has had that for a long time now.
Posted by: william | May 20, 2009 at 04:02 PM