Amazon Launches Flexible Payments Quick Starts – API Bundles for Fast Setup

Amazon has announced the general availability of their Flexible Payments Service today (FPS). The Flexible Payments Service is similar to Google Checkout and PayPal.

Amazon has also launched a new program named "Quick Starts". The idea with Quick Starts is to bundle multiple APIs together to shorten the development time needed to go live with the payments service. Amazon notes that the Quick Starts can drop the development time from days to hours.

The available Quick Starts include: Account Management Quick Start, Aggregated Payments Quick Start, Marketplace Quick Start, Advanced Quick Start and Basic Quick Start. To push the new Quick Starts, Amazon is offering 90 days of free payment processing.

In the relase, NY-based Meetup is noted for their exclusive use of Amazon Payments. I’ve heard mixed reviews from meetup attendees about the system. Some like it and others with Meetup supported Paypal. 

Online payment processing is starting to look like we need an OpenID-type solution. Having to suppport multiple payment systems is similar to supporting multiple login systems. What happens if you are losing sales (or event attendees) because you don’t support one of the other systems?