Amazon WebPay takes on paypal. | Hacker News Reader

Amazon WebPay takes on paypal.

payments.amazon.com

90 pointschanux34 comments

Unfortunately, all users have to have an Amazon account to make a payment through WebPay.

With PayPal's API, a site can keep the user on the site for the entire payment process, performing the purchase via a Web service call.

What alternative services are there to PayPal that offer the ability to act only as payment processors that get called via an API?

Good point. I suppose this is more competing with Paypal's standard payments (free), as opposed to Paypal's Payments Pro ($30/month). Although even with the free Paypal account the user can still pay with a CC, on paypal.com.

What alternative services are there to PayPal that offer the ability to act only as payment processors that get called via an API?

Authorize.net is the 800 lb. gorilla, and I believe 2checkout offers a similar service.

> What alternative services are there to PayPal that offer the ability to act only as payment processors that get called via an API?

What you're looking for is called a Payment Gateway. The defacto Ruby library for utilizing them is called Active Merchant (http://activemerchant.rubyforge.org/) and it includes ~30 different companies. If you're looking for a list of all the big ones, that's a good place to start.

I've personally used Authorize.net & Paypal before. Braintree is the company name that gets thrown around in 37signals' circle.

Yes there is http://www.chargify.com/

Chargify has yet to send me an email for their beta (which I've signed up for several times). They don't even bother to send an email acknowledging my interest. Its a great looking website and an interesting value proposition. When it gets ready for prime time, I'll try it if I haven't already moved on to a solution thats actually available.

It's US only for now. One of PayPal's strengths is its international nature.

Amazon has a bad track record for international deployment of anything relating to billing. Amazon Flexible Payments Service has been around ages and is still US only. Their Honor System didn't make it out of the US either.

PayPal has its issues but they've always been useful for the large international diaspora of US dealing but non-US dwelling wannabe Americans.. :-)

it's easy to buy things from amazon from here in chile (and, as far as i know, other places in south america). so at least something related to billing works just fine.

I'm not particularly enamored of Amazon's international deployment for anything. In Europe, for instance, they only have stores for Germany, France, and the UK, and each of those sites is available only in that language. So if you're elsewhere, say Spain, or Italy or Slovenia or something, I guess you just try and get by with whatever language you know, which is most likely English. But there's something lame about them not just simply shipping from the place most likely to get you your products in a timely manner, as they do in the US. In other words... what they have works, it's just fiddly and not very pleasant to use.

OTOH, as a company they seem a lot less evil than Paypal, so I'll be rooting for them.

They also split affiliate programs so that I can't include links for UK and US folk, say, that will simply take them to the most appropriate store I have to provide 2 links or do acrobatics sniffing IPs and whatnot.

about time, that space could use some competition and amazon has been executing well. I really look forward to this

Not only that but Amazon is uniquely positioned to actually give PayPal a run for its money. I look forward to seeing how this plays out.

My perpetual problem with Amazon payments is that, unlike Paypal, they don't have ubiquity among my customers and, unlike Google Checkout, they can't bribe me with favorable treatment on the search page to make me put up with non-ubiquity.

Is there favorable treatment from an SEO perspective if you use Google Checkout?

That would be highly unlikely in organic search results.

No, but they show an icon in AdWords and Google Products One Box results next to stores that take Checkout. Any trust indicator like that usually helps.

It may increase your chances of appearing in the One Box as well (as opposed to simply determining whether you get an icon next to your name), but I haven't heard that definitively.

there is speculation that google could use checkout to track conversions

imagine the power of tracking a customer from ad click all the way through to checkout

Interesting, I've always assumed the reverse, which is my main interest in Amazon payments. I assume mainstream people are more likely to have an Amazon account than a Paypal account.

Anecdotally, my sister, father, and grandfather all have Amazon accounts, and none have Paypal accounts. Also, everyone I encounter who's not technical knows what Amazon is, but few know Paypal.

Why not offer both?

Some clearly do - I checked out from a site today that offered me PayPal, Google or Amazon checkout.

I offer both Paypal and Google Checkout because they're both wrapped in a consistent API by e-junkie. e-junkie doesn't support Amazon at the moment. Writing in the support by myself would cost me lots of expensive engineering time for uncertain gain (I have no reason to suspect it will markedly improve conversions) where I could be doing something more productive like, e.g., SEO.

from the faq: (https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/personal/webpay/faq)

     5. Is there a fee for using Amazon WebPay?
         No, there is no charge to send money using Amazon WebPay.

i'm assuming that's just for purchases. how much are the fees to receive money?

From what I can tell there is no fee to send or receive payments with a limit capped at $500/month. Once a CC and bank account is verified, the limit could be either raised or removed at Amazon's discretion. A business account carries charges. Details are here: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/about?nodeId=6022#fees

The user agreement says that the difference between a personal account and a business account is that personal accounts may not receive credit card payments.

I don't see any fees.

Amazon would "make money" with access to interest free funds (money sitting in accounts), and by having more people pay for purchases via ACH, saving on credit cards fees.

And also not to mention getting spending data on transactions outside of amazon.com to help build up customer profiles :)

Not so fast, developers interested in using this for store fronts should see their fee/pricing structure: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=devpricing...

compare to PayPal: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-c....

Paypal tried making money on the float, but it didn't work. Amazon has a somewhat better chance of pulling that off since they don't have to ignite a fraud clusterfuck by giving out cash to get users like Paypal did. More importantly, their users have much less incentive to cashout since they know that the store of all stores will take it.

But the interest they could make on the float is nothing compared to the tithes they pay to the credit card companies, especially with the damn rewards cards. Just getting their prime customers to sign up for EFT, for normal Amazon purchases, has got to be worth a fuckton of money to them.

Ha, I can't add my checking account because I don't have State-issued ID, just a US Passport.

Cashiers just love hunting for a birthdate on a passport when I buy beer, but I haven't been needing to do that lately since I've started getting my beer delivered to my door, ironically enough by Amazon Fresh, and they don't check ID (though they won't leave it on your doorstep).

I think this is just for personal use. If you want to use Amazon as a payment processor through your website, you probably need to use a business-class service like the Amazon Flexible Payments Service listed here: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business

how's it deal with ~$.99 purchases?

are their fees comparable to paypal's for a couple thousand / month in transactions?

other than competition in the space - which, agreed, is a Good Thing - why would i use this as a 1) merchant or 2) consumer over paypal?

You can already use Amazon FPS with micropayments. I believe under the micropayments fee structure a $0.99 purchase would result in $0.10 transaction fee.

Knowing how great Amazon customer service it, it has to be amazing!

bravo.

It's Amazon's take on Ebay also

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