

Amazon Payments now supports recurring payments - songism
https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=paynow/subscription

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schtono
This is great news, but it would be even better if amazon dared to start their
service in Europe as well.

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?

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listic
Can't you use moneybookers instead?

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schtono
I should elaborate :)

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?

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qeorge
You can let customers pay with a credit card while using PayPal as your
gateway. If you're willing to pay the $30/month and setup SSL you can take CC
payments on your page using the PayPal gateway, with no account needed by your
customers.

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.

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schtono
Well, there actually there are 3 things that make me mad about PayPal:

(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 ;))]

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qeorge
Absolutely, (2) and (3) are unacceptable. Here's hoping Amazon is better and
comes to Germany soon.

Regarding the lack of competition, I found this article very interesting:

[http://stakeventures.com/articles/2008/07/22/the-man-
finally...](http://stakeventures.com/articles/2008/07/22/the-man-finally-
brought-e-gold-down)

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."

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lecha
Can anyone comment on why Amazon Payments still not available outside of US?

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".

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aristus
At Archivd we accept payments from the EU via FPS. Do you mean that non-US
businesses cannot sign up for Amazon Payments?

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shiranaihito
Exactly. It takes a "US-based credit card". Strange, and annoying.

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adamhowell
Is there a service -- similar to what Clickpass does for logins -- that uses
all of the consumer payment gateways that are out there (Paypal, Goog
Checkout, Amazon, Revolution Money, etc.) to give the user an easy choice at
checkout of how to pay for something?

I guess kinda like E-junkie but w/ more options. I'm sure there is -- and if
not I definitely think there should be.

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MicahWedemeyer
For the record, Amazon FPS has supported recurring payments for a while now.
We've been using them on Obsidian Portal for over a year.

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.

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mildweed
Posted: 142 days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=423099>

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aneesh
PayPal has a Direct Payment option where the credit card is processed in the
background, and the user stays on your page instead of being redirected to
PayPal. Essentially, the user doesn't know that PayPal is being used to
process their payment. Does Amazon offer something similar?

