Amazon Offers Free Credit Card Processing

Amazon has announced that they are offering free credit card processing through their AmazonPayments division through the end of September. AmazonPayments is similar to PayPal and Google Checkout. The service allows you to accept credit cards for products, services and subscriptions.

It appears the free processing was initially available only to non-profit organizations but is now open to any business.

There are a few restrictions:

• you can only sell up to $2 million – after that you pay fees
• you must have an average order size of more than $5
• the account must be new – created after April 29, 2009

One additional thing to consider if you use the service as a trial for subscriptions (where you charge your customer monthly/yearly/etc.). You will need to stay with Amazon for as long as the customer wants to remain a paying customer or you will need to ask them to move to whatever other service you use. This is something I’ve thought a lot about as I look at billing options for my startup. It might be worth testing Amazon on a one-time billing option only.