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Aug 03

Amazon Announces “Flexible Payment Service” or FPS

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With what may have been the biggest buildup to a blog post I’ve ever seen (all done via Twitter), Jeff Barr publicly announced Amazon’s FPS product - effectively ending my NDA about it from over a year ago.

FPS is a micro-payment system that shields the parties involved in the transaction from having to deal with all the “icky” stuff involved with online banking. It’s a game changing service that I believe will completely disrupt the online banking industry. FPS makes it so that anyone can have a merchant account in a way that has never been available online.

Amazon’s Flexible Payment Service is a part of their incredible set of APIs that they offer to developers. In the announcement post, Jeff gives a great background history on the Amazon APIs and what has led to FPS being created. Amazon has been incredible at having an open approach to their data and allowing developers extremely cheap, easy access to their services. FPS joins EC2, S3 and the Mechanical Turk as unique web services that can be mashed up in thousands of ways.

The API doc for FPS is reportedly 250 pages long – at the end of his announcement post, Jeff links to all the docs for FPS along with code samples, forums and tutorials. He also links to the ‘sandbox’ for FPS where you can play around with the API and muck things up safely.

The clock is now started for a Facebook integration module using FPS :)

3 comments

2 pings

  1. Phil801

    I clarified my statement a bit about “The clock is now started for a FB integration module using FPS” in a comment over on matthew ingram’s blog and I figured I should kind of cross-post it over here.

    My 3:00 am statement wasn’t meant to lay claim to a project – I’m putting it on my “list” which is quite long. I don’t expect to have it done anytime soon, it’s mostly a learning project to get familiar with the FPS platform. I’m totally expecting that someone else will have it done first.

    My statement about the clock ticking was (to my sleep-deprived brain) mostly more of a statement that I’m sure that FB/FPS integrations will be cranked out soon. Someone or several people are undoubtedly racing to get something like it done right now.

    I’ll just reiterate as well that for the last year I have had no doubt that FPS would totally change online financial transactions – and after going through what’s out there today, I’m even more convinced. The other online financial companies are going to have to do a lot of work to keep up with this!

  2. Matthew Reinbold

    I’m not that familiar with a number of these services – and while Amazon’s FPS seems to be a natural fit with its other S3 services how does it compare with PayPal and/or Google Checkout?

  3. Phil801

    @Matthew
    I’m not very familiar with Google Checkout, I saw a comparison between GC and PayPal somewhere and tried to find it again to no avail. I’ve only found bits and pieces comparing FPS and GC so I can’t really break it down. I think that a comparison will make a very good upcoming blog post though. Maybe in a day or two.

  1. Freshbooks helps Amazon take on PayPal » mathewingram.com/work

    [...] a post at the Freshbooks blog, and Amazon has more details on FPS here, and Phil Burns says he is already working on integrating it with [...]

  2. Phil801 - Geek Blog » The Amazon FPS API - not your simple widget

    [...] In my initial post about FPS, I said that I thought FPS would change the online banking industry.  After spending the weekend with it, I’m even more convinced of that!  There are some issues and short-comings that are causing frustrations for people. [...]

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