10 ms·

Introducing Login and Pay with Amazon

353 points by werner 13y ago

dingaling 13y ago
Humble Bundle started offering 'Pay with Amazon' a couple of years ago and it is very slowly expanding, in the UK at least. I looked into it last year and from the merchant perspective you have to try do the maths up front. There is a trade-off between micropayments and 'standard' amounts, with the fee and per centage varying. There are discounts for higher volumes but not automatically applied. All in all it reminded me of trying to calculate AWS bills up-front; not trivial and prone to assumptions. I'd say it targets an interesting niche the folk whom I know use it prefer Amazon's name to Paypal, and they are mostly higher-than-average salaried. I wonder what the comparison with other payment methods' demographics is?
- etler 13y ago
  I've seen it some other places too. Was Amazon Payments not open to everyone before? I just assumed it was.
  - cbhl 13y ago
    It looks like the distinction for this new service is that you get an API and can keep them on your site (without redirecting to amazon.com), so I'm thinking this is closer to Stripe than to PayPal. Apparently sellers get your name, email address, and postal code as soon as you log in.
  - Semaphor 13y ago
    Kickstarter US uses it as well. But before it was a pure payment processor, I assume this is now a more complete service.
devx 13y ago
Can Amazon develop a "21st century" payment system for its associate affiliates that doesn't involve receiving checks 4 months later? It's such a ridiculously obsolete system for one of the biggest web/digital companies.
- dingaling 13y ago
  Yes that's anachronistic. As an Amazon Seller my receipts are disbursed directly into my bank account every two weeks ( though usually £0.00 as I only sell books casually ). I wonder if there are tax / legal reasons why they don't do that with affiliates?
- simplekoala 13y ago
  You think they are not technically savvy to understand that the system is obsolete. It is deliberate. They defer payments, so they can hold up the cash for a few weeks; This gives them a working cash-flow pipeline they can dip into. There is a technical term for it. Erudite folk on HN can throw more light on this practice. EDIT: I am not specifically sure what they do with affiliates. I am talking about the general principle they operate on - They typically delay paying their vendors/suppliers, so there is a delay-pipeline of cash flow which Wall-Street analysts deem as a good thing business wise.
  - JoshTriplett 13y ago
    > There is a technical term for it. It's typically called the "float". Applies any time you receive a payment but take a while to pass it on.
    - jareau 13y ago
      Most payment companies aren't able to (due to regulations) do anything particularly high-yield with funds they steward for their merchants. The amount of float a company like Amazon is able to make may factor into their revenue model, but I imagine they hold on to funds more for regulatory and risk mitigation reasons.
      - _pius 13y ago
        MG Siegler and John Gruber engage in some fascinating speculation about how Amazon uses their float here: http://www.muleradio.net/thetalkshow/51/ http://www.muleradio.net/thetalkshow/51/ ... which was inspired, in part, by Eugene Wei's thoughts on how Amazon's float gives them leverage: http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins
DenisM 13y ago
Salient point: The fees start at $0.30 + 2.9% and go down form there, reaching $0.30 + 1.9% when you reach $100k/mo in volume. https://payments.amazon.com/business/pricingPlan https://payments.amazon.com/business/pricingPlan
- badgers 13y ago
  It would be interesting to see if they plan to link Amazon Coins to this somehow. They could try to aggressively go after PayPal by offering 1% cashback in Amazon Coins for all purchases through "Login and Pay with Amazon" and lock users into the Amazon currency.
simplekoala 13y ago
Is it Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) who submitted this story?
- https403 13y ago
  possible! all the posts are amazon services related.
- raghus 13y ago
  Yes
- pmelendez 13y ago
  if is not him is somebody who loves Amazon... (Considering his previous submissions)
- fudged71 13y ago
  It would make sense, as this is targeted towards developers and he knows his audience.
- bluetidepro 13y ago
  I think so based off the comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=werner https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=werner -
- werner 13y ago
  Yep, I thought it would be of interest to the HN community, but most importantly I was interested about the comments/feedback/criticism of those who would potentially be using it.
  - mike-cardwell 13y ago
    Looking forward to reading your reply to the current #1 comment by saurik
    - lawnchair_larry 13y ago
      Yeah, there is a real opportunity here not to just read saurik's well-thought out reply, but respond to it. I have no doubt that he has sent very detailed emails to them, speaking as one engineer to another, and there is no better way to turn someone off than to ignore them after they go through such pains to make your product better. We are watching ;)
Smrchy 13y ago
I just wish Amazon would not talk about 200m accounts worldwide and then offering payments only for US customers.
- pallandt 13y ago
  I'm Europe-based, I feel your pain. Every time I read about some new potentially awesome payment service, but only for the US-audience it consistently manages to make me grumpy all day thinking about all the lost business possibilities.
  - pc86 13y ago
    Presumably they'd lose a lot more business possibilities going to Europe (or more likely, a single European country) before the US.
    - jasonwocky 13y ago
      I think he meant his or her lost business opportunities.
      - pallandt 13y ago
        Yes, that's what I meant.
    - hrktb 13y ago
      Random numbers are not that meaningful but the US has 300 million habitants, the EU 500 million. Comparing GDP the EU states grouped together are a bit less than a tenth bigger than the US. I think there can plenty of reasons to start a business in the US first (looser regulations and local talent are what comesto my first to mind) but would you lose business starting in a bigger market ?
      - jlarocco 13y ago
        The EU has more people, but they're spread through 28 countries, each of which probably has different laws regulating financial transactions and payment processing, making it a lot more work.
drcode 13y ago
I'm surprised this is at the top of hacker news... Is there any innovation here? Seems like a "me too" product, or am I missing something?
- davidw 13y ago
  Amazon is a big company with a lot of customers, so even if it's not that exciting as a product in and of itself, it has the possibility to be a big player. I actually use their payment system for LiberWriter, and since my customers have to sign up with them anyway, it's perfect. Also, they're pretty pleasant to deal with, by and large.
- capkutay 13y ago
  It's pretty significant when a top player does a 'me too' product. For one, amazon is providing more validation AND competition to the login and payment infrastructure area. I'm sure many entrepreneurial devs will find this interesting.
- badman_ting 13y ago
  Well, it's not something truly """innovative""" like a smoke detector you can program with your computer. I'll give you that.
  - sirbob 13y ago
    The difference is subtle. Currently, social companies like Facebook offer login/identify services, and different companies like PayPal offer payment. But do consumers trust Facebook for anything other than social (like shopping)? Conversion is everything for online merchants. Identifying customers early in the shopping experience allows better marketing, better engagement, and higher conversion. Plus, to be able to pay again in 1-click is huge (no additional login, no entering credit cards). So ultimately it means more $$ for merchants.
- Miyamoto 13y ago
  > or am I missing something? Yea. It's Amazon. They're kind of a big deal.
omarrr 13y ago
This has the potential of being a serious competitor to Paypal. Amazon is on a roll.
Dirlewanger 13y ago
I'm all for anything that slowly usurps Paypal as the ubiquitous middleman for paying online.
- TallGuyShort 13y ago
  A couple of years back I set up a payments system for a web application offering a choice of Amazon Payments, PayPal, or Google Checkout. Amazon was by far the easiest, best-documented API to work with. I think it would be best for everybody else if they became the dominant player in this space.
  - Lost_BiomedE 13y ago
    Still around? I am looking for a drop-in cart with Amazon and Paypal options. I was using Paypal and Google checkout and need to migrate.
    - TallGuyShort 13y ago
      I'm afraid I don't own the IP and I've since changed employers. There are drop-in options (a brief search yielded fortune3.com, as an example), but I did not use any and can't really comment on them.
- bovermyer 13y ago
  Google Wallet?
- philsnow 13y ago
  Do you really want Paypal completely ousted ? It seems to me that having viable competitors around is what's going to keep whoever's on top trying hard to keep customers happy.
gingerlime 13y ago
Is this available internationally and/or with non $ US currencies?
- fudged71 13y ago
  Yes, in the docs they mention rates for non-US payments.
  - gingerlime 13y ago
    Which docs? Where? all I see is rates for non-profits and micropayments. Even in the detailed fee scheduled I can't find a single mention... I feel like I'm either blind, stupid, or looking at the wrong website (or all of the above).
    - fudged71 13y ago
      There is a column on this page for "International Credit Card" fees. I assume it applies here? https://payments.amazon.com/developer https://payments.amazon.com/developer
  - crazygringo 13y ago
    I'm having the same problem as gingerlime -- can you point out where? It's not in any of the docs I'm seeing.
    - fudged71 13y ago
      There is a column on this page for "International Credit Card" fees. I assume it applies here? https://payments.amazon.com/developer https://payments.amazon.com/developer
- al3xdm 13y ago
  Only for buyers. Sellers need to be U.S based. To get started for free, sign up for an Amazon Payments seller account. You will need your legal business name, contact information, a US credit card, and a US address. After you sign up, you'll be able to use our tools to create HTML that you can copy and paste into your website code to show our button and start accepting payments. https://payments.amazon.com/business/html-button https://payments.amazon.com/business/html-button
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tlrobinson 13y ago
Ok, now how about enabling HTTPS for amazon.com? Off topic, I know, but come on. It's the last major service I use that doesn't even support it.
- pallandt 13y ago
  I thought only browsing was HTTP, but as soon as a customer proceeded to checkout, it switched to HTTPS?
- rza 13y ago
  Just tried it. It uses https as soon as you login for me.
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    Crucially, the login form itself isn't included in the high-volume (http) landing pages, but is isolated behind a (https) link from those pages.
- donavanm 13y ago
  I really have no idea what this comment even means. The entire ordering and sign in pipeline has been https forever. Once you are on https it stays https until you explicitly got to http:// http://, iirc. Lastly theres no content, that im aware of, that is available plaintext and not https.
  - tlrobinson 13y ago
    https://www.amazon.com/ https://www.amazon.com/ redirects me to http://www.amazon.com/ http://www.amazon.com/ as does every product page. This is one reason why that's a problem: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/ http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/
MaxGabriel 13y ago
I just saw this used on the wifi purchase page on my flight to San Francisco.
nly 13y ago
So is this just an few-click OAuth thing? Click the button on a 3rd party website, and if you're logged in to Amazon, they send over your details, charge you, and you're done?
saurik 13y ago
Amazon already offered the login feature (this was launched earlier this year), and they already offered an API-based payments platform (Amazon Flexible Payments, launched in 2008). Rather than just allow you to pass login tokens to Flexible Payments, however, they have decided to provide a completely incompatible API with a new set of endpoints, a completely incompatible accounting system, and even completely new terminology to describe the same set of steps. As someone who has invested heavily in Amazon Payments solution over the last four and a half years (for a long time I had been their largest customer doing mobile payments, and when jailbreaks come around I still leap upward in their charts), I frankly look at this as a massive "fuck you", and not any kind of reasonable step forward :(. Seriously: integrating payment processing is never the hard part; instead, it is integrating all of the accounting backends from different providers so you have all of the charges, fees, fines, refunds, disputes, etc. all being calculated and scraped in a way such that despite processing millions of transactions you are in a position to, for example, file things like VAT and income tax. It can take months of experience to figure out "oh, this API is failing to correlate chargebacks in these specific circumstances, but I can work around the issue like this" or to learn what all the different kinds of error messages that a user can end up seeing so you can provide support. It might even be worth it occasionally to rewrite everything if the new services always provided a superset of the functionality from the old ones and there was some kind of migration path, but Amazon just keeps making entirely unrelated solutions. After the way Amazon has treated their FPS platform (they seem incapable of making even trivial changes: even just fixing wording in e-mails that they agree is flawed and confusing to users), I cannot imagine ever investing in another Amazon Payments product again (and I have tons of more reasons why I've come to this position, which I'm probably going to be putting together into a blog post soon, largely having to do with the lack of any reasonable payment fraud prevention model for third-party products). I honestly get the impression that they outsource all of their development for Amazon Payments and no longer have any expertise in-house required to actually maintain the software once deployed. (If nothing else, from having the opportunity to speak with a couple Payments developers working out of Amazon's India offices, I know that they are not running development for these products out of Seattle; the time zone differences might just be horribly brutal attempting to coordinate?) To be clear: I tried very hard to work with them, having tons of meetings with greater and greater numbers of people on their side, putting together more and more detailed descriptions of what is going wrong on their end (even teaching them some things about payment fraud, which simply should not happen: I should not ever have anything insightful to say about payment fraud that they haven't already spent years thinking about... I'm just a tiny merchant, whereas they are either one of the world's largest merchants or a payment processing firm depending on which angle you are looking at them from ;P), before finally giving up a few months ago (I've just resolved to remove them entirely from my stack and replace them with more reasonable solutions). Somehow PayPal manages, every few months, to provide interesting new functionality--even provide entirely new API layers--and it all maps back to the same accounting backends, old code continues to work with minimal changes, and the UI keeps improving (slowly, but surely). Amazon FPS in 2008 far surpassed similar offerings, but in the last five years PayPal simply built up the same functionality (better) while Amazon let theirs rot. It isn't even clear how this new Login and Pay with Amazon service is connected with Amazon Payments: they mention a random subset of the now-numerous Amazon payments-related products in the documentation as being incompatible with this (including Checkout by Amazon), but they don't even bother to mention a whole host of others (including Flexible Payments and Simple Pay). I've found an older version of the documentation (using Google Cache) that references Amazon Payments Advanced (another Amazon Payments offering that seemed targeted, ironically, at less advanced use cases), but the new integration guide limits the scope to just payments made via this service. They seriously have so many incompatible solutions now that it doesn't even seem worthwhile attempting to document how they relate :(.
untilHellbanned 13y ago
"When they login with Amazon, you get the customer's name, email address and zip code" Getting email addresses is the key. That doesn't happen with most 3rd party-login/OAuth implementers. "Rates for Micropayments: For transactions less than or equal to $9.99, we offer a fee of 5.0% + $0.05 per transaction." These micropayment rates match Paypal and is better than Stripe. I'm keeping an eye on this.
leejoramo 13y ago
Who else provides this combination of both login and payment processing?
- zizee 13y ago
  We're working on logins with payments for SASS apps at http://authic.com http://authic.com That said, our offering is pretty different from what Amazon is doing. We are more about letting apps customizing their login/payment experience so that customers don't realize they are not interacting with the app. We let you integrate with your Braintree account (Stripe support on it's way). Our aim is to make take away the common developer drudgery of setting up signup, signin, password reset, recurring payments and sending out pdf receipts that are common to building SASS webapps.
zt 13y ago
I think ultimately the big identity services will basically be how we pay for things on the internet. That's this Pay with Amazon one-click button, where pay with GMail will go, and what Facebook will eventually come to if they ever care about payments. This causes some problems as your accounts become all the more valuable, but why should I ever have to enter my credit card info on the web more than once?
chiph 13y ago
How do I (the seller) get my money? I didn't see anything about their sending regular payments to my business' bank account (but I may have missed it).
- tobyjsullivan 13y ago
  They transfer to your bank account at your request. "You can withdraw funds from your Amazon Payments account at any time. Transfer can be made to a verified bank account or an Amazon.com Gift Card." https://payments.amazon.com/help/Marketplace-Seller-and-Kickstarter-Creator-Accounts/Withdrawing-Funds-from-Your-Account-Balance https://payments.amazon.com/help/Marketplace-Seller-and-Kick...
akurilin 13y ago
Does this take care of subscriptions, or is this for one-time payments?
- zizee 13y ago
  Someone mentioned that this doesn't support purchasing of digital products/services, so if when you write "Subscriptions" you mean "SASS app subscriptions" I think the answer is no. (Happy to be corrected) If that is what you are looking for a service that supports SASS login/subscriptions, perhaps you might be interested in my startup http://authic.com http://authic.com
marcamillion 13y ago
Uggghhh....why can't Amazon make something simple. I want to know basic things like how would I - as a developer - get my money when people pay me. Why is that so hard to find?
moneyrich4 13y ago
you guys should not use this - amazon has a history of retarded tech support they also overban customers.
mikegogulski 13y ago
Dearest Great God C'thulhu, Please eat the people who keep giving Jeff Bezos more money inciting him to become an even bigger jerk last. Thank you. I remain, as always, Your humble Cultist, Mike
- leashless 13y ago
  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! (but you knew I was going to say that)
jusben1369 13y ago
This is going to be tough. A lot of merchants won't want a competitor (Amazon) to be anywhere near their site - especially at checkout. "Oh yeah, pay by Amazon. I wonder if they have this item cheaper there" Typically PayPal and Apple don't have that conflict
bigdipper 13y ago
This is a smart move (ignoring their half assed attempts earlier in their lives). 1. Vertical integration with merchants that sell on amazon and their own websites 2. Encourage merchants to inventory, and fulfill and transact via amazon 3. Enable a Global marketplace for their merchants 4. Next step, subscriptions and data. But it all hinges on execution...
paulhauggis 13y ago
I have bad experiences with Amazon, so I don't think I would ever use this service. A couple of years ago, I was a seller on the Amazon marketplace. My account got banned and there was absolutely no way to talk to a real person to try to resolve the issue. They shuffled me around to different customer service reps (all through email, no phone support) who would give me cookie-cutter responses. Eventually, they just stopped answering my emails and told me not to contact them anymore. Luckily, I got my remaining account balance back in 90 days.
- grogenaut 13y ago
  details
bosky101 13y ago
>> at this time it does not support payments for digital goods or services. Found this in the fine print. ~B
zerop 13y ago
Problems -- No Micropayments and Probably service is only for US merchants..
buro9 13y ago
"Make Amazon's Customers Your Customers" Except this is on your web-site and you would be making your customer Amazon's customer. There is a deep conflict in this solution, and no doubt some people will jump for it not deliberating on what it could mean for them. For me this represents a shift away from payment processing (Stripe, or even PayPal), and towards ownership of the set of master records that power an online commerce business. There is a fine but clear line between helping to process a payment and taking over the ownership of the customer. This is your customer, not Amazon's, and the master record should be in your hand and leveraged by you, not Amazon. I would be very hesitant to walk this path.
- grogenaut 13y ago
  Yeah, because without using amazon for payments you'd be completely safe with competing with amazon on a product by product basis on cost... However if you're providing novel solutions that aren't low cost solutions, and are innovative "disrupting" "gamechanging" "social" products, why do you care that amazon is your payments provider, or for that matter, anyone. Other than what they actually provide and their service that is.
  - pixelmade 13y ago
    Why would you voluntarily give Amazon all of your sales data? They'll aggregate it, mine it, then use it to optimize their store / pricing / products. At least with PayPal, I know they won't be using my sales data against me.
    - grogenaut 13y ago
      You didn't read what I said. If you're selling cheaper socks, you're going to lose to amazon and walmart. If you sell new innovative products, you aren't going to lose to them. Also, with paypal, they get your sales data, sell it to others, AND then just keep your money and close your account.
yashg 13y ago
Only for US merchants. Sigh. Ok.
sandeshkumar 13y ago
This is killer!
exo_duz 13y ago
Hope they will start allowing overseas sellers soon. I know a lot of merchants who'd be interested in this service.
josephagoss 13y ago
Hey werner, any chance you will accept Bitcoin one day?
- rgbrgb 13y ago
  I'm sure they will when your mom starts using bitcoins. Amazon isn't really a company that likes to blaze trails.

353 points by werner 13y ago

Humble Bundle started offering 'Pay with Amazon' a couple of years ago and it is very slowly expanding, in the UK at least. I looked into it last year and from the merchant perspective you have to try do the maths up front. There is a trade-off between micropayments and 'standard' amounts, with the fee and per centage varying. There are discounts for higher volumes but not automatically applied. All in all it reminded me of trying to calculate AWS bills up-front; not trivial and prone to assumptions. I'd say it targets an interesting niche the folk whom I know use it prefer Amazon's name to Paypal, and they are mostly higher-than-average salaried. I wonder what the comparison with other payment methods' demographics is?

etler 13y ago
I've seen it some other places too. Was Amazon Payments not open to everyone before? I just assumed it was.
- cbhl 13y ago
  It looks like the distinction for this new service is that you get an API and can keep them on your site (without redirecting to amazon.com), so I'm thinking this is closer to Stripe than to PayPal. Apparently sellers get your name, email address, and postal code as soon as you log in.
- Semaphor 13y ago
  Kickstarter US uses it as well. But before it was a pure payment processor, I assume this is now a more complete service.

devx 13y ago

Can Amazon develop a "21st century" payment system for its associate affiliates that doesn't involve receiving checks 4 months later? It's such a ridiculously obsolete system for one of the biggest web/digital companies.

dingaling 13y ago
Yes that's anachronistic. As an Amazon Seller my receipts are disbursed directly into my bank account every two weeks ( though usually £0.00 as I only sell books casually ). I wonder if there are tax / legal reasons why they don't do that with affiliates?
simplekoala 13y ago
You think they are not technically savvy to understand that the system is obsolete. It is deliberate. They defer payments, so they can hold up the cash for a few weeks; This gives them a working cash-flow pipeline they can dip into. There is a technical term for it. Erudite folk on HN can throw more light on this practice. EDIT: I am not specifically sure what they do with affiliates. I am talking about the general principle they operate on - They typically delay paying their vendors/suppliers, so there is a delay-pipeline of cash flow which Wall-Street analysts deem as a good thing business wise.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  > There is a technical term for it. It's typically called the "float". Applies any time you receive a payment but take a while to pass it on.
  - jareau 13y ago
    Most payment companies aren't able to (due to regulations) do anything particularly high-yield with funds they steward for their merchants. The amount of float a company like Amazon is able to make may factor into their revenue model, but I imagine they hold on to funds more for regulatory and risk mitigation reasons.
    - _pius 13y ago
      MG Siegler and John Gruber engage in some fascinating speculation about how Amazon uses their float here: http://www.muleradio.net/thetalkshow/51/ http://www.muleradio.net/thetalkshow/51/ ... which was inspired, in part, by Eugene Wei's thoughts on how Amazon's float gives them leverage: http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins

DenisM 13y ago

Salient point: The fees start at $0.30 + 2.9% and go down form there, reaching $0.30 + 1.9% when you reach $100k/mo in volume. https://payments.amazon.com/business/pricingPlan https://payments.amazon.com/business/pricingPlan

badgers 13y ago
It would be interesting to see if they plan to link Amazon Coins to this somehow. They could try to aggressively go after PayPal by offering 1% cashback in Amazon Coins for all purchases through "Login and Pay with Amazon" and lock users into the Amazon currency.

simplekoala 13y ago

Is it Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) who submitted this story?

https403 13y ago
possible! all the posts are amazon services related.
raghus 13y ago
Yes
pmelendez 13y ago
if is not him is somebody who loves Amazon... (Considering his previous submissions)
fudged71 13y ago
It would make sense, as this is targeted towards developers and he knows his audience.
bluetidepro 13y ago
I think so based off the comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=werner https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=werner -
werner 13y ago
Yep, I thought it would be of interest to the HN community, but most importantly I was interested about the comments/feedback/criticism of those who would potentially be using it.
- mike-cardwell 13y ago
  Looking forward to reading your reply to the current #1 comment by saurik
  - lawnchair_larry 13y ago
    Yeah, there is a real opportunity here not to just read saurik's well-thought out reply, but respond to it. I have no doubt that he has sent very detailed emails to them, speaking as one engineer to another, and there is no better way to turn someone off than to ignore them after they go through such pains to make your product better. We are watching ;)

Smrchy 13y ago

I just wish Amazon would not talk about 200m accounts worldwide and then offering payments only for US customers.

pallandt 13y ago
I'm Europe-based, I feel your pain. Every time I read about some new potentially awesome payment service, but only for the US-audience it consistently manages to make me grumpy all day thinking about all the lost business possibilities.
- pc86 13y ago
  Presumably they'd lose a lot more business possibilities going to Europe (or more likely, a single European country) before the US.
  - jasonwocky 13y ago
    I think he meant his or her lost business opportunities.
    - pallandt 13y ago
      Yes, that's what I meant.
  - hrktb 13y ago
    Random numbers are not that meaningful but the US has 300 million habitants, the EU 500 million. Comparing GDP the EU states grouped together are a bit less than a tenth bigger than the US. I think there can plenty of reasons to start a business in the US first (looser regulations and local talent are what comesto my first to mind) but would you lose business starting in a bigger market ?
    - jlarocco 13y ago
      The EU has more people, but they're spread through 28 countries, each of which probably has different laws regulating financial transactions and payment processing, making it a lot more work.

drcode 13y ago

I'm surprised this is at the top of hacker news... Is there any innovation here? Seems like a "me too" product, or am I missing something?

davidw 13y ago
Amazon is a big company with a lot of customers, so even if it's not that exciting as a product in and of itself, it has the possibility to be a big player. I actually use their payment system for LiberWriter, and since my customers have to sign up with them anyway, it's perfect. Also, they're pretty pleasant to deal with, by and large.
capkutay 13y ago
It's pretty significant when a top player does a 'me too' product. For one, amazon is providing more validation AND competition to the login and payment infrastructure area. I'm sure many entrepreneurial devs will find this interesting.
badman_ting 13y ago
Well, it's not something truly """innovative""" like a smoke detector you can program with your computer. I'll give you that.
- sirbob 13y ago
  The difference is subtle. Currently, social companies like Facebook offer login/identify services, and different companies like PayPal offer payment. But do consumers trust Facebook for anything other than social (like shopping)? Conversion is everything for online merchants. Identifying customers early in the shopping experience allows better marketing, better engagement, and higher conversion. Plus, to be able to pay again in 1-click is huge (no additional login, no entering credit cards). So ultimately it means more $$ for merchants.
Miyamoto 13y ago
> or am I missing something? Yea. It's Amazon. They're kind of a big deal.

omarrr 13y ago

This has the potential of being a serious competitor to Paypal. Amazon is on a roll.

Dirlewanger 13y ago

I'm all for anything that slowly usurps Paypal as the ubiquitous middleman for paying online.

TallGuyShort 13y ago
A couple of years back I set up a payments system for a web application offering a choice of Amazon Payments, PayPal, or Google Checkout. Amazon was by far the easiest, best-documented API to work with. I think it would be best for everybody else if they became the dominant player in this space.
- Lost_BiomedE 13y ago
  Still around? I am looking for a drop-in cart with Amazon and Paypal options. I was using Paypal and Google checkout and need to migrate.
  - TallGuyShort 13y ago
    I'm afraid I don't own the IP and I've since changed employers. There are drop-in options (a brief search yielded fortune3.com, as an example), but I did not use any and can't really comment on them.
bovermyer 13y ago
Google Wallet?
philsnow 13y ago
Do you really want Paypal completely ousted ? It seems to me that having viable competitors around is what's going to keep whoever's on top trying hard to keep customers happy.

gingerlime 13y ago

Is this available internationally and/or with non $ US currencies?

fudged71 13y ago
Yes, in the docs they mention rates for non-US payments.
- gingerlime 13y ago
  Which docs? Where? all I see is rates for non-profits and micropayments. Even in the detailed fee scheduled I can't find a single mention... I feel like I'm either blind, stupid, or looking at the wrong website (or all of the above).
  - fudged71 13y ago
    There is a column on this page for "International Credit Card" fees. I assume it applies here? https://payments.amazon.com/developer https://payments.amazon.com/developer
- crazygringo 13y ago
  I'm having the same problem as gingerlime -- can you point out where? It's not in any of the docs I'm seeing.
  - fudged71 13y ago
    There is a column on this page for "International Credit Card" fees. I assume it applies here? https://payments.amazon.com/developer https://payments.amazon.com/developer
al3xdm 13y ago
Only for buyers. Sellers need to be U.S based. To get started for free, sign up for an Amazon Payments seller account. You will need your legal business name, contact information, a US credit card, and a US address. After you sign up, you'll be able to use our tools to create HTML that you can copy and paste into your website code to show our button and start accepting payments. https://payments.amazon.com/business/html-button https://payments.amazon.com/business/html-button

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tlrobinson 13y ago

Ok, now how about enabling HTTPS for amazon.com? Off topic, I know, but come on. It's the last major service I use that doesn't even support it.

pallandt 13y ago
I thought only browsing was HTTP, but as soon as a customer proceeded to checkout, it switched to HTTPS?
rza 13y ago
Just tried it. It uses https as soon as you login for me.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  Crucially, the login form itself isn't included in the high-volume (http) landing pages, but is isolated behind a (https) link from those pages.
donavanm 13y ago
I really have no idea what this comment even means. The entire ordering and sign in pipeline has been https forever. Once you are on https it stays https until you explicitly got to http:// http://, iirc. Lastly theres no content, that im aware of, that is available plaintext and not https.
- tlrobinson 13y ago
  https://www.amazon.com/ https://www.amazon.com/ redirects me to http://www.amazon.com/ http://www.amazon.com/ as does every product page. This is one reason why that's a problem: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/ http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/

MaxGabriel 13y ago

I just saw this used on the wifi purchase page on my flight to San Francisco.

nly 13y ago

So is this just an few-click OAuth thing? Click the button on a 3rd party website, and if you're logged in to Amazon, they send over your details, charge you, and you're done?

saurik 13y ago

Amazon already offered the login feature (this was launched earlier this year), and they already offered an API-based payments platform (Amazon Flexible Payments, launched in 2008). Rather than just allow you to pass login tokens to Flexible Payments, however, they have decided to provide a completely incompatible API with a new set of endpoints, a completely incompatible accounting system, and even completely new terminology to describe the same set of steps. As someone who has invested heavily in Amazon Payments solution over the last four and a half years (for a long time I had been their largest customer doing mobile payments, and when jailbreaks come around I still leap upward in their charts), I frankly look at this as a massive "fuck you", and not any kind of reasonable step forward :(. Seriously: integrating payment processing is never the hard part; instead, it is integrating all of the accounting backends from different providers so you have all of the charges, fees, fines, refunds, disputes, etc. all being calculated and scraped in a way such that despite processing millions of transactions you are in a position to, for example, file things like VAT and income tax. It can take months of experience to figure out "oh, this API is failing to correlate chargebacks in these specific circumstances, but I can work around the issue like this" or to learn what all the different kinds of error messages that a user can end up seeing so you can provide support. It might even be worth it occasionally to rewrite everything if the new services always provided a superset of the functionality from the old ones and there was some kind of migration path, but Amazon just keeps making entirely unrelated solutions. After the way Amazon has treated their FPS platform (they seem incapable of making even trivial changes: even just fixing wording in e-mails that they agree is flawed and confusing to users), I cannot imagine ever investing in another Amazon Payments product again (and I have tons of more reasons why I've come to this position, which I'm probably going to be putting together into a blog post soon, largely having to do with the lack of any reasonable payment fraud prevention model for third-party products). I honestly get the impression that they outsource all of their development for Amazon Payments and no longer have any expertise in-house required to actually maintain the software once deployed. (If nothing else, from having the opportunity to speak with a couple Payments developers working out of Amazon's India offices, I know that they are not running development for these products out of Seattle; the time zone differences might just be horribly brutal attempting to coordinate?) To be clear: I tried very hard to work with them, having tons of meetings with greater and greater numbers of people on their side, putting together more and more detailed descriptions of what is going wrong on their end (even teaching them some things about payment fraud, which simply should not happen: I should not ever have anything insightful to say about payment fraud that they haven't already spent years thinking about... I'm just a tiny merchant, whereas they are either one of the world's largest merchants or a payment processing firm depending on which angle you are looking at them from ;P), before finally giving up a few months ago (I've just resolved to remove them entirely from my stack and replace them with more reasonable solutions). Somehow PayPal manages, every few months, to provide interesting new functionality--even provide entirely new API layers--and it all maps back to the same accounting backends, old code continues to work with minimal changes, and the UI keeps improving (slowly, but surely). Amazon FPS in 2008 far surpassed similar offerings, but in the last five years PayPal simply built up the same functionality (better) while Amazon let theirs rot. It isn't even clear how this new Login and Pay with Amazon service is connected with Amazon Payments: they mention a random subset of the now-numerous Amazon payments-related products in the documentation as being incompatible with this (including Checkout by Amazon), but they don't even bother to mention a whole host of others (including Flexible Payments and Simple Pay). I've found an older version of the documentation (using Google Cache) that references Amazon Payments Advanced (another Amazon Payments offering that seemed targeted, ironically, at less advanced use cases), but the new integration guide limits the scope to just payments made via this service. They seriously have so many incompatible solutions now that it doesn't even seem worthwhile attempting to document how they relate :(.

untilHellbanned 13y ago

"When they login with Amazon, you get the customer's name, email address and zip code" Getting email addresses is the key. That doesn't happen with most 3rd party-login/OAuth implementers. "Rates for Micropayments: For transactions less than or equal to $9.99, we offer a fee of 5.0% + $0.05 per transaction." These micropayment rates match Paypal and is better than Stripe. I'm keeping an eye on this.

leejoramo 13y ago

Who else provides this combination of both login and payment processing?

zizee 13y ago
We're working on logins with payments for SASS apps at http://authic.com http://authic.com That said, our offering is pretty different from what Amazon is doing. We are more about letting apps customizing their login/payment experience so that customers don't realize they are not interacting with the app. We let you integrate with your Braintree account (Stripe support on it's way). Our aim is to make take away the common developer drudgery of setting up signup, signin, password reset, recurring payments and sending out pdf receipts that are common to building SASS webapps.

zt 13y ago

I think ultimately the big identity services will basically be how we pay for things on the internet. That's this Pay with Amazon one-click button, where pay with GMail will go, and what Facebook will eventually come to if they ever care about payments. This causes some problems as your accounts become all the more valuable, but why should I ever have to enter my credit card info on the web more than once?

chiph 13y ago

How do I (the seller) get my money? I didn't see anything about their sending regular payments to my business' bank account (but I may have missed it).

tobyjsullivan 13y ago
They transfer to your bank account at your request. "You can withdraw funds from your Amazon Payments account at any time. Transfer can be made to a verified bank account or an Amazon.com Gift Card." https://payments.amazon.com/help/Marketplace-Seller-and-Kickstarter-Creator-Accounts/Withdrawing-Funds-from-Your-Account-Balance https://payments.amazon.com/help/Marketplace-Seller-and-Kick...

akurilin 13y ago

Does this take care of subscriptions, or is this for one-time payments?

zizee 13y ago
Someone mentioned that this doesn't support purchasing of digital products/services, so if when you write "Subscriptions" you mean "SASS app subscriptions" I think the answer is no. (Happy to be corrected) If that is what you are looking for a service that supports SASS login/subscriptions, perhaps you might be interested in my startup http://authic.com http://authic.com

marcamillion 13y ago

Uggghhh....why can't Amazon make something simple. I want to know basic things like how would I - as a developer - get my money when people pay me. Why is that so hard to find?

moneyrich4 13y ago

you guys should not use this - amazon has a history of retarded tech support they also overban customers.

mikegogulski 13y ago

Dearest Great God C'thulhu, Please eat the people who keep giving Jeff Bezos more money inciting him to become an even bigger jerk last. Thank you. I remain, as always, Your humble Cultist, Mike

leashless 13y ago
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! (but you knew I was going to say that)

jusben1369 13y ago

This is going to be tough. A lot of merchants won't want a competitor (Amazon) to be anywhere near their site - especially at checkout. "Oh yeah, pay by Amazon. I wonder if they have this item cheaper there" Typically PayPal and Apple don't have that conflict

bigdipper 13y ago

This is a smart move (ignoring their half assed attempts earlier in their lives). 1. Vertical integration with merchants that sell on amazon and their own websites 2. Encourage merchants to inventory, and fulfill and transact via amazon 3. Enable a Global marketplace for their merchants 4. Next step, subscriptions and data. But it all hinges on execution...

paulhauggis 13y ago

I have bad experiences with Amazon, so I don't think I would ever use this service. A couple of years ago, I was a seller on the Amazon marketplace. My account got banned and there was absolutely no way to talk to a real person to try to resolve the issue. They shuffled me around to different customer service reps (all through email, no phone support) who would give me cookie-cutter responses. Eventually, they just stopped answering my emails and told me not to contact them anymore. Luckily, I got my remaining account balance back in 90 days.

grogenaut 13y ago
details

bosky101 13y ago

>> at this time it does not support payments for digital goods or services. Found this in the fine print. ~B

zerop 13y ago

Problems -- No Micropayments and Probably service is only for US merchants..

buro9 13y ago

"Make Amazon's Customers Your Customers" Except this is on your web-site and you would be making your customer Amazon's customer. There is a deep conflict in this solution, and no doubt some people will jump for it not deliberating on what it could mean for them. For me this represents a shift away from payment processing (Stripe, or even PayPal), and towards ownership of the set of master records that power an online commerce business. There is a fine but clear line between helping to process a payment and taking over the ownership of the customer. This is your customer, not Amazon's, and the master record should be in your hand and leveraged by you, not Amazon. I would be very hesitant to walk this path.

grogenaut 13y ago
Yeah, because without using amazon for payments you'd be completely safe with competing with amazon on a product by product basis on cost... However if you're providing novel solutions that aren't low cost solutions, and are innovative "disrupting" "gamechanging" "social" products, why do you care that amazon is your payments provider, or for that matter, anyone. Other than what they actually provide and their service that is.
- pixelmade 13y ago
  Why would you voluntarily give Amazon all of your sales data? They'll aggregate it, mine it, then use it to optimize their store / pricing / products. At least with PayPal, I know they won't be using my sales data against me.
  - grogenaut 13y ago
    You didn't read what I said. If you're selling cheaper socks, you're going to lose to amazon and walmart. If you sell new innovative products, you aren't going to lose to them. Also, with paypal, they get your sales data, sell it to others, AND then just keep your money and close your account.

yashg 13y ago

Only for US merchants. Sigh. Ok.

sandeshkumar 13y ago

This is killer!

exo_duz 13y ago

Hope they will start allowing overseas sellers soon. I know a lot of merchants who'd be interested in this service.

josephagoss 13y ago

Hey werner, any chance you will accept Bitcoin one day?

rgbrgb 13y ago
I'm sure they will when your mom starts using bitcoins. Amazon isn't really a company that likes to blaze trails.