Coder’s Eye

I’m not sure how I missed it before, but PayPal has a new competitor in Amazon Payments.

I applied this evening to the beta “Flexible Payment Service” so that I can develop a plugin for Satchmo, using Amazon Payments.

It looks really interesting. The base features will be a snap to do in python/Satchmo, of course. But the other features are quite intriguing. I’m particularly interested in the the ability to:

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.

And of course I’m also interested in the multiple and recurring payment options. But what’s this? Aggregating micro-payments using pre or post-paid systems. Nice! This is what I was hoping Google Checkout would be.

I went ahead slapped a little “pay now” Amazon Payments button on my Invisible Castle gaming site. It is just to lower the barrier to paying me, and to test out how well it works. It isn’t micro payment, recurring, or a split-payment, so it isn’t enormously-geeky-great, but it is money after all. Hehe.

Technorati Tags: webservices, amazon payments, paypal