Amazon launches PayPal rivaling Flexible Payments Service

Online shopping giant Amazon has launched its own payment service named Flexible Payments Service.

The service has been launched in beta edition and it has been designed to allow developers to more easily incorporate payment processing into their sites.

Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Web services evangelist wrote in a blog post that this new service would shield developers from many of the messy and complex issues which arise when dealing with money.

Technically speaking Flexible Payments Service is a set of Web services APIs built on top of Amazon’s payment infrastructure that allow the movement of money between two entities, humans or computers.

Barr added: “We’ve taken all that we know about dealing with credit cards, bank accounts, fraud checking and customer service and wrapped it all up into one convenient package.”

The service might be in beta testing at the moment but Barr said that that “the entire payment system is fully functional and the applications listed above are now capable of dealing with real money and real transactions. As you can imagine, there’s a substantial amount of behind the scenes work happening here and we are planning to increase the load on our systems and on our people in a controlled fashion.”

Checkout: Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) - Limited Beta