I just received an email about the limited beta for a new Amazon web service: Amazon Flexible Payments. It appears to have just gone live with documentation, code and a sandbox for developers to play with. A quick glance at the API and product offering reveal a complex and powerful payment system at competitive pricing. There are no startup costs, montly fees or minimums to get started.

I'm detecting large amounts of win in this sector

Here are some of the key features:

• Create "Payment Instructions" to define conditions and constraints desired for a given transaction, and programmatically obtain payment authorizations or "tokens" that represent these Payment Instructions from customers.
• Execute one-time, multiple, or recurring payments on behalf of customers.
• Aggregate micro-transactions into a single larger transaction using Prepaid and Postpaid capabilities.
• Build payment applications where you are neither the sender nor the recipient of funds. You can build marketplace applications that enable the movement of money between two third parties.

It's a shame Web 2.0 doesn't accept money.

Welcome to Costco, I love you

Dealing with payment systems has always been a nightmare for developers. The APIs usually suck, PayPal gives chronic ball ache and most gateways can only be resold through sketchy third parties. We are big fans of Amazon's service play so far and utilize their EC2 and S3 services on a daily basis. If Payments can follow through and Amazon doesn't PayPal people by acting like a bank then we might actually have found a commerce solution that makes sense.