

Experience with Amazon Flexible Payment Service - tx


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tx
Just wanted to share (I know this topic is all time popular) about our
experinece with Amazon FPS.

First of all, we charge a small subscription fee each month. This severely
limited our abilities to cherry pick payment processors. Second, we did not
want to deal with (store on our servers) sensitive data such as credit card
numbers.

From a technical point of view FPS is a bit too complicated. Definitely more
so than other gateways we looked at. That is because it's too generic: instead
of 2 perties there are always 3. "Build your own PayPal!" is their idea. For
people who aren't building their own paypal it is a bit annoying.

Secondly, your users must have Amazon accounts. That may be good and bad,
depending on how you look at it. To us it was bad: we did not want people to
see "Amazon" stuff during sign up process - we had some unpleasant experience
with similar approach taken by PayPal.

But most importantly there is ZERO customer service. They have no phone
support. None. If you try calling Amazon you won't find a single person who
knows anything about FPS. And their "Technical Support" form WILL NOT return
back to you within 24 hours. Basically it means that the system is not quite
ready for production use: if your customers cards get rejected for no reason,
you will need to solve that problem NOW.

Well.. that's about it. Just wanted to share, since I picked up FPS advice
somewhere on this board. We're going with authorize.net although it's unclear
how easy it is to work with them using Ruby.

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edgeztv
Can you share what your fees are for authorize.net? They don't disclosing
anything on their website...

~~~
tx
Yes, we went with Wells Fargo and they gave us an excellent custom quote (much
cheaper than web site suggests). No setup fees, fixed $31/mo and $0.20 per
transaction. We have our limit though, and once we exceed it the price will go
up.

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rzwitserloot
What do you mean with 'limit', exactly?

~~~
tx
To enjoy those lower fees we must stay under a certain number of transactions
a month and (I believe) we have a max. limit on a transaction amount. I
apologize for being unable to give you full details, since my partner is
finalizing cost issues with them as I'm typing this.

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zviband
Amazon's FPS wasn't meant to be the end-all online payment system. It really
seems like it was developed because so many webmasters hated paypal. And while
going through amazon is a lot better than having ugly ass paypal... the users
still sees a third party, which can seem unprofessional.

In my personal experience, I applied for FPS. They sent me an email asking me
some more questions, then said they would get back to me in two days. It's now
been two weeks.

~~~
dvroth
Does anyone know who does the credit card processing for Amazon FPS? I know
that in the case of PayPal, it used to be a company called EPX and is now done
by Wells Fargo, but can't seem to find anywhere who is processing for
Amazon...

