{"id":290,"date":"2007-08-03T16:10:23","date_gmt":"2007-08-03T15:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=290"},"modified":"2007-08-03T16:10:23","modified_gmt":"2007-08-03T15:10:23","slug":"amazon-fps-is-this-the-micropayment-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/290-amazon-fps-is-this-the-micropayment-revolution.html","title":{"rendered":"Amazon FPS &#8211; is this the micropayment revolution?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Amazon.com has announced the beta release of the&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/browse.html?node=342430011\">Flexible Payment Service<\/a>, an addition to the range of web services which already includes on-demand computing (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Simple Storage (Amazon S3).<\/p>\n<p>At first glance, this looks like big news for the Internet. It bears all the Amazon hallmarks: low price, developer-friendly, and easy to adopt. Here&#8217;s the pricing:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>For Transactions &gt;= $10:<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers\n<li>2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits\n<li>2.9% + $0.30 for credit card<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>For Transactions &lt; $10:<\/em>  <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1.5% + $0.01 for Amazon Payments balance transfers\n<li>2.0% + $0.05 for bank account debits\n<li>5.0% + $0.05 for credit card<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>For Amazon Payments balance transfers &lt; $0.05:<\/em>  <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>20% of the transaction amount, with a minimum fee of $0.0025<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>There is no up-front fee. All these prices are reasonable, but the last one deserves particular scrutiny. If both buyer and seller have an Amazon Payments account, then you can receive a tiny payment at a realistic cost. You could even pay me a single cent, three-quarters of which I would get to keep.<\/p>\n<p>Now look at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-overview-outside\">PayPal&#8217;s fees<\/a>.&nbsp;$0.30 fee plus a percentage for any transaction. Google Checkout? Complex, because Google wants to hook you into its AdWords advertising by giving free transactions up to a proportion of your AdWords spend, and because it is&nbsp;subsidizing the service to buy market share from PayPal. But <a href=\"https:\/\/checkout.google.com\/seller\/fees.html?hl=en_US\">the fees<\/a>&nbsp;include $0.20 per transaction plus a percentage, which means you cannot do micropayments.<\/p>\n<p>Amazon FPS is based on web services, so that developers can easily&nbsp;build it into their web&nbsp;applications.<\/p>\n<p>FPS is interesting to me as a writer. It means I could self-publish and change a small amount per article &#8211; maybe just a few pennies.&nbsp;It is also interesting as a means of monetizing web services. A neat feature is that buyers can limit their risk by specifying both&nbsp;transaction limits and&nbsp;the total amount transferred over a period, for a particular recipient.<\/p>\n<p>If Amazon FPS takes off, then Amazon becomes a major identify provider (because you will use your Amazon ID for payments to third-party sites) as well as becoming an Internet bank. <\/p>\n<p>I think Amazon is a sufficiently well-trusted name that this could work. I should add, though, that nobody is sure&nbsp;of the&nbsp;significance of micropayments &#8211; we&#8217;ve just speculated that they might be a key enabler of (ugh) Business 2.0. See <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Micropayment\">Wikipedia<\/a> for a discussion and links. So far, it has&nbsp;been advertising rather than micropayments that has changed the game. But that was before Amazon FPS. What do you think?<\/p>\n<p>PS &#8211; see <a href=\"http:\/\/aws.typepad.com\/aws\/2007\/08\/pay-me-now-or-p.html\">Jeff Barr&#8217;s post<\/a> for more information and early adopter examples.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wlWriterSmartContent\" id=\"0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:6c61d6a3-d177-42ab-b9fc-c4edb5466d5c\" contenteditable=\"false\" style=\"padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px\">Technorati tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/amazon\" rel=\"tag\">amazon<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/amazon%20fps\" rel=\"tag\">amazon fps<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/micro-payments\" rel=\"tag\">micro-payments<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/google\" rel=\"tag\">google<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/paypal\" rel=\"tag\">paypal<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amazon.com has announced the beta release of the&nbsp;Flexible Payment Service, an addition to the range of web services which already includes on-demand computing (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Simple Storage (Amazon S3). At first glance, this looks like big news for the Internet. It bears all the Amazon hallmarks: low price, developer-friendly, and easy to adopt. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/290-amazon-fps-is-this-the-micropayment-revolution.html\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Amazon FPS &#8211; is this the micropayment revolution?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,80,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-software-development","category-web-authoring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}