Amazon Payments now supports recurring payments
payments.amazon.com
payments.amazon.com
So far, there is no "real" competition to paypal for small developer sheds. In fact, I am sooo p about it, that I think I'm going to start a payments service myself! Anyone come and join me?
There is afaik no service, that offers a nice and easy payment integration for small e-commerce websites. Of course you can get all the heavyweight stuff with merchant accounts and so on. But if you're a small garage-shop which wants to accept credit card payments, there is no alternative to paypal (at least in germany).
I think there's no need to mention here how much the payment process of paypal sucks anyways, as it has been discussed here already extensively.
Within my own little company, I've estimated that we loose about 30% of our customers in the last phase of checking out, where people are on behalf of paypals website. As far as i've seen, amazon does a much better job here.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but i think you dont even have to open an account with pasword and stuff to checkout using ur credit card?
PayPal still sucks, but if you're losing a lot of sales to the PayPal signup this might be a quick fix. I should be able to dredge up some PHP code if that would help you out.
But I hope Amazon Payments comes to Europe soon. Its silly to have so little competition in such a high-demand field.
(1) Bad process (users have to create accounts/ passwords before they can checkout)
(2) Rejection of some credit card numbers (happened to some of our customers, due to their PayPal's security measures - the cards worked on other sites)
(3) Blocking of merchant accounts (happened to us twice. Only way to resolve the issue was entering my drivers license + id number, which were not accepted - spent several days trying to get it fixed by phone)
You're absolutely right that one could probably avoid issue (1) by choosing their $30 plan and integrating it into our own website. But I am pretty sure (2) and (3) will still apply, which is nothing but horrible if you are a small business.
Another question: Does anyone have an idea why there is no competition in the market so far? I suppose there must be kind of regulatory issues, although they must be even harder in the US where there is competition.
[AND thanks for your code-offer - I think I'll get that done on my own anyways ;) If not, I'd be happy to get back to you ;))]
Regarding the lack of competition, I found this article very interesting:
http://stakeventures.com/articles/2008/07/22/the-man-finally...
The author's argument is that the US's "Know Your Customer" regulation is the bottleneck. In his words: "KYC since it was introduced in the late 90s as a requirement has been the single most destructive concept for innovation and startups in the financial space."
Amazon.com operates and accepts payments in EU and Canada. AWS is available in EU. Payments service is available for close to two years. There must be something some other answer than "it just takes time".
I guess kinda like E-junkie but w/ more options. I'm sure there is -- and if not I definitely think there should be.
What's new is that they've made it slightly easier to integrate with an existing site. This is good news, as the full power of FPS is an awesome and frightening thing to behold.