I’ve spent a lot of time this weekend digging through the API for the new Amazon Flexible Payment System (FPS). This is not just a quick whiz-bang API that you spend 20 minutes with and have something cool up and running! Just getting set-up to communicate with FPS is a somewhat time consuming learning curve. Then there’s the 259 pages of documentation for the API! I’m still a bit old school when it comes to docs – I really like to have a hard copy that I can mark up and keep notes in when I’m digging deep into documentation. So – here is what the FPS API looks like printed out:
Notice the DVD that is propped up with the manual – it’s almost half as tall as the disc!
I’ve had an additional task to go through – I’ll be programming FPS in VB.Net. Amazon supplies a C# SDK which I’ve converted to VB – it requires more than just a pass through SharpDevelop to get it working right! I’m almost done with the VB version which I plan to share here and on the AWS community code site.
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.
You have to use a pass-through UI with Amazon (send your customers to Amazon) for initial setup of accounts, some large e-commerce sites are saying this is a show stopper for them (it won’t bother me for what I’m going to be doing with it). I actually see this as a good thing. People generally trust Amazon.com – why should they trust me? My app I’m building won’t ever know your credit card information – that all stays with Amazon and you get passed to their site to manage your account.
The other short-coming right now is that it’s currently US customers only. Amazon has said they are working on this, hopefully they’ll internationalize it soon.
Other than those two issues, FPS is extremely robust. It allows you to create what looks like a very secure structure (called tokens) for giving permission to vendors to access your account. Tokens can be one-time use or multi-use, they can be a precise amount or more flexible. Basically, as the customer, you have full control over what the vendor is able to do with your money (how much and when they can take). All account activity is hosted by Amazon, you can go to your Amazon account at any time and see what transactions have taken place. I think that this will help a lot with online fraud issues. Sure, there will be ways to breach the security, but this is a pretty tight system (or so it looks for now). From the vendors perspective, transactions are very inexpensive as compared to a merchant account. Plus, you can do micro-payments, allowing customers to accumulate multiple sub-dollar transactions and accumulate them for a single, one-time fee transaction.
Jesse Stay and I are currently working on a mashup that includes FPS, Facebook and others. We’re pretty excited about the possibilities with FPS and should have something rolled out soon! As I’ve been going through everything required to get going with FPS, I’ve been writing a getting started guide for VB.Net programmers. I’ll have that published in the next day or two.
