Amazon Pay
Amazon Pay is an online payments processing service owned by Amazon. Launched in 2007,[1] Amazon Pay uses the consumer base of Amazon.com and focuses on giving users the option to pay with their Amazon accounts on external merchant websites. As of March 2021, the service became available in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, India, the Republic of Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Type of business
English
2007
Yes
Free
Active
Evolution[edit]
Checkout by Amazon (CBA)[edit]
Checkout by Amazon (CBA) was an e-commerce solution that allowed web merchants to accept Amazon account information and use Amazon for payment processing. CBA could manage several aspects of the transaction, including order processing, promotional discounts, shipping rates, sales tax calculation, and up-selling. Depending on the merchant's needs, CBA could be integrated into the merchant's systems with manual processing (through Seller Central) or through SOAP APIs or downloadable CSV files. CBA also claimed to reduce the bad debt because of Amazon's fraud detection capabilities. CBA was discontinued in the UK and Germany in 2016 and in the US in April 2017.[9]
Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS)[edit]
Flexible Payments Service (FPS) was an Amazon Web Service that allowed money transfer between two entities using a technology built on single, multiple, and unlimited use payment tokens. Merchants managed their service use via API or solution providers. They accessed the account through a merchant account on the Amazon Payments website. The service was launched as a limited beta in August 2007 and, later in February 2009, was promoted to General Availability. FPS differed from CBA because FPS did not handle additional capabilities associated with order processing, such as promotions, tax, and shipping. FPS also provided the payments processing for the Amazon Web Services DevPay service but it was discontinued in June 2015.[10]
Security[edit]
On September 22, 2010, Amazon published a security advisory [13] regarding a security flaw in its Amazon Payments SDKs. This flaw allows a shopper to shop for free in web stores using those SDKs. Amazon mandated all web stores to upgrade to its new SDKs before November 1, 2010. Amazon acknowledged security researcher Rui Wang for finding this bug. The detail of the flaw is documented in the paper "How to Shop for Free Online - Security Analysis of Cashier-as-a-Service Based Web Stores" by Rui Wang, Shuo Chen, XiaoFeng Wang, and Shaz Qadeer.[14]