I love you, Amazon. If the integration on this works fairly decently (at least as well as Paypal's) I think I'll try that for my upcoming SAAS project.
Things I'll be looking at:
* Do you require customers to have an Amazon account to use this? (This is the #1 gotcha with Paypal recurring payments.)
* Is it easy to modify a subscription midstream? Can I give customers free months, discounts, etc?
* Administration tools? Administration API? (I want to click Refund on my site, not your site.)
* Can I conveniently work with multiple price points at once?
* Reporting: can you make my bookkeeping/accounting less painful?
* Migration: here's something Paypal has never done right -- suppose you sell the website or, for another reason, need to change what account receives payments. Do you have to cancel all subscriptions?
* Rails integration: can I get out of actually writing and testing as much of this as humanly possible?
If you use the underlying FPS APIs, I believe you can set up recurring payments with no logins (I'm only going on docs, I haven't had direct coding experience with FPS yet).
Currently I use Paypal/Google Checkout, which don't give me the option of refunding algorithmically. I also do my stats tracking on my site. This means that when a customer asks for their money back I have to find their record in my system, click refund, then find it again in Paypal and click refund.
Am I lazy enough to spend 15 minutes once to save myself 30 seconds 30 times a year? Oh heck yes I am.
It's fair - a bit more expensive than you could get doing it yourself. I think if you shop around, you can 2.2% for Visa/MC and 20 cents per transaction even with no credit or volume. The question if it's worth it is how do they handle refunds, cancellations, and most especially - expired credit cards. In a monthly service, you might lose more to expiring CC's than to cancellations! People's cards go over their limit, get canceled, or simply expire. I was surprised when I started seeing monthly credit card attrition numbers, it can brutal.
So if Amazon lets customers cancel without you/your support team doing anything, that's valuable. If they let you offer "no questions asked refunds" where the customer can get it themself - that might be valuable. And biggest of all - if you can define an automatic process for dead CC's, that'd be really valuable. If Amazon would check if a CC verified, then automatically try again right away if it didn't, then again the next day and day after, then sent a series of 3 emails - if they offered something like that, that'd be phenomenal. I'm going to doubt they do though...
So their prices - competitive enough. You'll want to make sure you're not held hostage to them once you start using them, which I suspect you are. And does someone need an Amazon account to sign up? Big question there. Depending on what value they add, they might be worth using. But only if they don't hold your customer data hostage if you want to leave as you grow.
If I understand correctly, you need to pay a percentage and base transaction fee to process credit cards anyway. This service from Amazon bakes their cut into those two charges already. The Amazon charges are cheaper than competing services, but how do they compare to doing it yourself? Is that even an option?
This service sounds highly attractive except for the requiring of an Amazon account. Hopefully, that problem can be mitigated somehow. I'd have to have a good hard think.
I'm confused now, at the link above Chase paymenttech is listed as a processor connection. But they are listed as an authorize.net reseller at this link?
I'd like to know as well. Amazon FPS seems like one of the best/most comprehensive solutions for payments, but from what I can gather from their site, it's currently still limited to companies with a physical address, bank account and credit card in the US. I'd love to use their services as a Canadian company...
Yes that's what I want to know. My company is incorporated in Hong Kong and apart from paypal I haven't found other payment processors I could use (that are not too expensive)... BTW, if anyone has some tips on that I'd be interested.
On a somewhat related note, has anyone read the OReilly book on AWS? I haven't looked into Amazon's documentation yet, but I'm wondering if the investment in that book would really help the integration process.
This hasn't launched yet. It's in the "sandbox," which means you can test it. I submitted a question asking if they had any sort of timetable on launching Subscriptions - nothing definitive in their response.
Once again - I didn't understand, why is Donation restricted to 'Non-profit 501 C3 organizations' only? What if I create an online free service, and want to accept donations?
Things I'll be looking at:
* Do you require customers to have an Amazon account to use this? (This is the #1 gotcha with Paypal recurring payments.)
* Is it easy to modify a subscription midstream? Can I give customers free months, discounts, etc?
* Administration tools? Administration API? (I want to click Refund on my site, not your site.)
* Can I conveniently work with multiple price points at once?
* Reporting: can you make my bookkeeping/accounting less painful?
* Migration: here's something Paypal has never done right -- suppose you sell the website or, for another reason, need to change what account receives payments. Do you have to cancel all subscriptions?
* Rails integration: can I get out of actually writing and testing as much of this as humanly possible?