Amazon FPS Functionality

With Amazon FPS, you can build innovative payment applications with a new level of flexibility in how you execute payments. Amazon FPS supports the processing of payments using credit cards, bank accounts and Amazon Payments account balances to send or receive money.

Amazon FPS Quick Starts are simplified API sets which enable even easier implementation of common payment transaction types such as one time payments, recurring payments and pre-payments. Amazon FPS Quick Starts enable you to:

• Accept one time payments on your website for selling physical goods, digital content, and services using Basic Quick Start.
• Execute periodic or delayed payment features required by subscription and usage-based services such as digital music and online storage using Advanced Quick Start.
• Facilitate transactions between a buyer and a third party seller, take a cut of the transaction, and have control over who pays the transaction processing fees with Marketplace Quick Start.
• Aggregate multiple payments, including micropayments, into a single, larger transaction and charge the customer before or after the service is provided with Aggregated Payments Quick Start.
• Programmatically access account activity using Account Management Quick Start. Alternatively, account activity and balances can be viewed on the Amazon Payments website.

Amazon FPS also offers a feature called Payment Instructions to set conditions or constraints on a transaction. Quick Starts simplify the complexity of setting Payment Instructions for senders and recipients via a set of user interface pipelines. These interfaces enable Payment Instructions to be set across a range of parameters which allow Quick Starts to support most use cases. Alternatively, our Comprehensive API Set can be used to support applications that need access to a more granular set of payment APIs. Developers can use these lower-level APIs to create even more unique Payment Instructions, virtually without limitation, on the types of rules or conditions associated with a given transaction

Developers can utilize the Amazon FPS Sandbox to build and test applications without using real money or incurring any transaction charges. Sign-up for the Amazon FPS Sandbox to get started now.

Service Highlights for Developers

Easiest Way to Charge Amazon Customers – Amazon FPS enables tens of millions of existing Amazon customers to transact online with little friction, simply using the same accounts and payment methods that they use for purchases on Amazon.com – without having to re-enter information.

Increased Conversion – Amazon’s trusted payment experience, A-to-z Guarantee, and the ease with which tens of millions of Amazon customers can pay on a website will help optimize conversion on the website.

Flexibility – Amazon FPS takes a traditionally limited and inflexible payments process and allows developers to expose individual payment conditions that enable payments to be processed in virtually any imaginable way. This ultimately results in a better end-user experience, as well as innovative new business models. Amazon FPS uses a feature called Payment Instructions to provide this flexibility to developers.

Every FPS transaction has a sender (party making payments), a recipient (party receiving payments), and a caller (party making the API calls to Amazon FPS). Callers are the same as recipients if the developer is the party receiving funds. Each party to a transaction might want the flexibility to place conditions or rules around that transaction referred to as Payment Instructions. Examples of possible Payment Instructions include:

• Transaction Amount: Specify minimum, maximum, range, or specific amount for a certain payment.
• Transaction Date: Configure a payment transaction to be executed at a specific time (e.g. specific day, weekly, monthly, or date range).
• Spending Limit: Set daily, weekly or monthly limits on the number of transactions or total amount spent, to control spending on your application.
• Recipient List: Specify recipients who are authorized to access and receive funds.
• Payment Method: Specify the payment methods (credit card, bank account debit, balance transfer) you want to accept through your application.
• Fees: Control which party pays the Amazon FPS transaction fees.

Inexpensive – Amazon FPS passes on to you the benefits of lower processing costs on bank account debits and Amazon Payments balance transfers. Amazon FPS charges less when the actual cost to process a payment is lower, rather than charging the same fixed fee for all payment methods. There is no up-front investment or monthly payment for running an application using the service. In addition, you can build and test an application for free using the Amazon FPS sandbox.

Lower Cost with Amazon’s Proven Fraud Detection – Amazon FPS leverages Amazon’s proven fraud detection capabilities, chargeback controls, and risk management processes to reduce bad debt.

Reliable and Secure Payments Platform – Amazon has spent over a decade developing, testing, and operating a reliable, scalable and secure payments infrastructure to support millions of daily transactions. Amazon FPS exposes this robust infrastructure to you and your customers.

Service Highlights for Consumers

Convenience – Consumers can use information from their Amazon.com account to complete payments on a website without having to re-enter their shipping address or payment information.

Trusted Payment Experience – The secure and trusted payment experience consumers enjoy on Amazon.com is now available on your website.

Purchase Protection for Consumers – Consumers will feel more confident purchasing, knowing that they have the same protection under the Amazon A-to-z Guarantee that they have when they shop on Amazon.com.

Pricing

There is no minimum fee and no start-up charges to use Amazon FPS. In addition, you can use the Amazon FPS Sandbox for free. Fees are assessed on a per-transaction basis and vary depending on the payment method used and the transaction amount:

• 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 above $10 and 5%+$0.05 for credit card for transactions below $10.
  
  Different fees apply for transaction amounts less than $0.05. Learn more about micro-transaction pricing and how you can qualify for volume discounts.

Note: This fee schedule is for payments by US customers only. For an additional charge of 1% of the transaction amount, non-US customers can make payments using credit cards (but not using Amazon Payments balance transfers or bank accounts at this time).

(Payment processing services for Amazon FPS are sold by Amazon Payments, Inc.)

Developer Resources

• Resource Center
  Browse the Resource Center for code samples, documentation, release notes, and more information to help you build innovative applications. Subscribe to RSS feeds or set up e-mail watches to be alerted of the latest developments for this service.
• WSDL
• Developer Forums
• Amazon FPS Sandbox
• Amazon Payments Account Management website
• FAQs

Detailed Description

Quick Starts: What They Are, How They Serve Your Payment Needs

Amazon FPS Quick Starts aggregate many of the previously available Amazon FPS APIs into simplified sets of APIs that substantially reduce the steps you must take to enable transaction processing on your website. Now, you can enable common payment transactions such as one time payments, recurring payments and pre-payments in hours rather than days.

• Basic Quick Start enables one-time payments for e-commerce and digital goods websites, donations, and online services. Click here to learn more.
• 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. Click here to learn more.
• Marketplace Quick Start is designed for building marketplace applications. You can facilitate transactions between a buyer and a third party seller, take a cut of the transaction, and have control over who pays the processing fees. Click here to learn more.
• 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 allow your customers to create prepaid balances that can be used subsequently to make multiple smaller purchases on your website 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. Click here to learn more.
• Account Management Quick Start simplifies integrating account activity, balance and transaction information into websites and existing applications. Click here to learn more.

Payment Instructions: Building Blocks of Amazon FPS

Every FPS transaction has a sender (party making payments), a recipient (party receiving payments), and a caller (party making the API calls to Amazon FPS). Callers are the same as recipients if the developer is the party receiving funds. Each party to a transaction might want the flexibility to place conditions or rules around that transaction called Payment Instructions. Examples of possible Payment Instructions include:

• Transaction amounts: Set a transaction minimum, maximum, range, specific amount, or some combination of these.
• Transaction Date: Configure a payment transaction to be executed at a specific time (e.g. specific day, weekly, monthly, or date range).
• Spending and usage limits: Control the maximum number, maximum amount and frequency of payments (e.g., charge no more than 5 times per day with a maximum of 20 charges, charge no more than $5 per week with a maximum of $50 in total charges, or charge $10 every month).
• Recipient list: Allow or exclude a specific set of recipients in a given transaction.
• Payment methods accepted: Credit cards, bank accounts or Amazon Payments balance, in any combination.
• Fee preference: Specify which party pays the Amazon FPS transaction fees.

Amazon FPS provides Gatekeeper (GK) language that allows the parties to create Payment Instructions. Once developers define these Payment Instructions, they use an InstallPaymentInstruction API call to install these instructions and receive a “token,” a unique, secure handle to the Payment Instructions. Amazon FPS makes it easy for callers to obtain Payment Instructions from their users by providing a set of co-branded user interface pipelines. Callers send users to these user interface pipelines to show them a proposed set of Payment Instructions (presented simply as terms of service). By agreeing to those terms in the user interface, senders or recipients authorize these Payment Instructions and allow the caller to receive the corresponding token back.

Callers can use the Pay API with the sender, recipient and caller tokens to execute payment transactions. Callers can also use the Reserve API to reserve funds on a sender’s credit card before the goods or services are fulfilled. Callers can then use the Settle API to charge the sender’s credit card when the goods or services are delivered.

With Payment Instructions and a unique three party payment system, FPS offers you unmatched flexibility in how you build innovative payment applications. To leverage this flexibility, you can use one or more of the interoperable Quick Starts or use the comprehensive set of APIs that FPS exposes to support applications that need access to a more granular set of payment APIs.

Try it out using Amazon FPS Sandbox

Amazon FPS provides a fully functional sandbox environment to build and test applications or services without transacting real money or incurring any transaction charges. You can use your Amazon Web Services account to access the sandbox. Sign-up for Amazon FPS Sandbox

The sandbox provides you with a web service API end-point to test API invocations. It allows you to simulate important payment errors. You can also access the sandbox website to create test accounts for your sandbox application and manage them.

We strongly encourage developers to test their applications or services using the sandbox before releasing them to their customers. The sandbox is designed to enable faster development cycles, easier debugging, and lower operational overhead.

Getting started

The best way to understand Amazon FPS is to read the Amazon FPS Getting Started Guide and start playing in the Amazon FPS Sandbox.The Resource Center contains multiple code samples to help you get started quickly!

Are you looking for a checkout solution or a cut and paste html payment solution?

For a Checkout solution, try Checkout by Amazon. It’s easy to integrate and brings Amazon’s secure and trusted checkout experience to your website with unique features including 1-Click. Learn more.

Amazon Payments also offers Amazon Simple Pay, a set of copy-and-paste HTML buttons allowing you to quickly integrate Amazon Payments into your website. If you don’t need Amazon’s end-to-end checkout pipeline, but still want to enable your customers to use their payment information already on file at Amazon, use Amazon Simple Pay.

Amazon FPS differs from other Amazon Payments products such as Amazon Simple Pay and Checkout by Amazon in that it allows for a greater degree of customization of payment solutions for a variety of businesses.

Intended Usage and Restrictions

• Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement
• If you choose to sign up for this service, you will be asked to create an Amazon Payments account and agree to the Amazon Payments User Agreement.
• Your use of Amazon Payments is subject to the Amazon Payments Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Notice.