Tech Shout!

On Friday, Amazon released the beat version of its latest web service that is essentially aimed at making it possible for developers to incorporate payment processing into their sites, in a much easy manner. Amazon boasts that the FPS is the very first service built specifically for software developers.

On the Amazon blog, Jeff Barr, the company’s Web services evangelist stated that just the way Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) offers on-demand storage capability and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides as-needed computing capacity, Amazon’s new Flexible Payments Service (FPS) “shields developers from many of the messy and complex issues which arise when dealing with money.”

According to the e-commerce company, the latest FPS is a set of Web services APIs developed on top of Amazon’s payment infrastructure that enables the flow of money between two bodies, humans or computers. Barr wrote, “We’ve taken all that we know about dealing with credit cards, bank accounts, fraud checking and customer service and wrapped it all up into one convenient package,” Barr wrote.

FPS bundles cross-checked payment instructions from each party to make sure the validity of each transaction. As per the Seattle, Washington-based company, developers can make use of this model to develop one-time or recurring transaction and transactions limited by data or amount.

To use the FPS, neither are there any minimum fees or any startup charges levied. All pricing is per-transaction based on the transaction size and the payment method.

Furthermore, Amazon has designed an FPS Sandbox for developers to check their applications without actually moving money. In the sandbox, developers can reproduce several types of errors in the payment process to test the new application.

Even though the Amazon FPS is a limited service, which is still in its beta stage, Barr maintained that “the entire payment system is fully functional and the applications listed above are now capable of dealing with real money and real transactions. As you can imagine, there’s a substantial amount of behind the scenes work happening here and we are planning to increase the load on our systems and on our people in a controlled fashion.”

To read more about the new Amazon FPS, click here to head there.