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Amazon.com: Amazon FPS, Amazon Flexible Payment Service: Amazon Web Services:Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.

Amazon FPS offers developers unmatched flexibility in how they can structure payment instructions, including standing instructions that can remain in place for multiple transactions. These instructions impose conditions and constraints on money movements and can be set by both senders and receivers of funds. For example, a sender might set a spending limit per week for a particular named recipient. Only that named recipient would be able to withdraw funds and only up to an amount per week equal to the spending limit. A piece of FPS functionality called the GateKeeper automatically enforces the constraints you set with payment instructions. When the sender or receiver is a computer system, payment instructions are set programmatically using APIs. FPS also provides a simple set of user interfaces that humans can use. From the users' point of view, they simply see terms of service and a request to accept those terms.

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Amazon FPS Functionality

You can use the extensive feature set of Amazon FPS to conduct a wide variety of transactions under virtually any set of constraints. Key features include:

• Send and receive money using credit card, bank account or Amazon Payments balance transfer as payment methods.
• Create "Payment Instructions" to define conditions and constraints desired for a given transaction, and programmatically obtain payment authorizations or "tokens" that represent these Payment Instructions from customers.
• Execute one-time, multiple, or recurring payments on behalf of customers.
• Aggregate micro-transactions into a single larger transaction using Prepaid and Postpaid capabilities.
• Build payment applications where you are neither the sender nor the recipient of funds. You can build marketplace applications that enable the movement of money between two third parties.
• View account balances, transaction histories, and transaction details on the Amazon Payments web site.
• Utilize the Amazon FPS sandbox to build and test applications without using real money or incurring any transaction charges.

Service Highlights

Flexible: Amazon FPS provides developers with a new level of flexibility in how they can execute payments.

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, but developers can also act as third-party callers enabling a transaction between a sender and a recipient (and taking a cut of transactions if desired).

Each party to a transaction might want the flexibility to place conditions or rules around that transaction (such as "allow only five transactions or $50 per month," or "refuse payment after August 1"). Typically, developers have not had an easy mechanism for allowing senders and recipients to express these preferences. Amazon FPS uses a feature called Payment Instructions to make it easy to set whatever constraints each party desires. Developers can use the Gatekeeper language to programmatically describe whatever instructions are needed - virtually without limitation.

Developers can simplify the complexity of setting Payment Instructions for senders and recipients via a set of user interface pipelines provided by Amazon FPS. Callers send users to these user interfaces where they view a proposed set of Payment Instructions, presented simply as terms of service. By agreeing to those terms, senders are authorizing the Payment Instructions to be installed for use in a transaction.

Examples of possible Payment Instructions include:

• Transaction Amount: Specify fixed 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 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 charges.

With the multitude of possible Payment Instructions, Amazon FPS must have a way to ensure that the various parties' instructions agree. This is the job of the GateKeeper, which checks if the Payment Instructions are compatible, and then makes the binary decision on whether a transaction can proceed or not.

Amazon FPS takes a traditionally limited and inflexible payments process, and instead lets developers expose individual payment conditions that enable them to charge in new ways and customers to pay in new ways. This ultimately enables a better end user experience as well as innovative new business models.

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