Support for additional Amazon Payments methods

[DiveGearExpress]

Amazon Payments is their payment subsidiary offering a variety of payment solutions for both consumers and businesses.
In summary Amazon Payments offers three different payment solutions for businesses:

1) Checkout by Amazon (CBA)
2) Amazon Simple Pay (ASP)
3) Amazon Flexible Payment Services (FPS)

CBA - offers the 'full Amazon checkout experience' to the consumer because the business manages the order through Amazon. The business is _forced_ to manage the order processing flow on Seller Central, meaning they must acknowledge the order to the consumer, provide tracking information to the consumer, and must communicate with the consumer via the Seller Central e-mail interface for order changes, modifications, warranty issues, etc. This is currently the only one of the three offered by ShopSite, and integrates very smoothly into the ShopSite checkout page.

ASP - is exactly what it sounds like... a simple payment only solution with no order processing flows attached or enforced... essentially an Amazon version of PayPal. Although a guess on my part, from Amazon's descriptions it appears ASP would integrate with ShopSite checkout page in a manner similar to PayPal - meaning the consumer must 'leave' the checkout page to make payment and then return.

FPS - this is a 'developer toolkit', i.e. a set of API's that a developer uses to implement whatever final solution they see fit using Amazon's platform. This solution can provide the slick in checkout page integration of CBA with the simple payment only features of ASP.

In communicating with customers I find that their reason for preferring to use Amazon as their payment method is they already have an account with Amazon and want to avoid 're-entering' their billing/shipping/card information. They are not selecting it for any of the order flow processing services of CBA. Because we have our own in-house order processing flow (via StoneEdge Order Manager) and in-house customer communications administration (via Cerberus HelpDesk), we are increasingly burdened by the double work of managing both our own order processing flow AND Amazon's CBA order flow, which must be handled manually through Amazon's Seller Central website. This can become extremely convoluted when the consumer want's to make changes to their order after having paid via Amazon, because CBA offers a very limited set of capabilities to amend an order. In many cases to change an order, we have to ask the customer to 'cancel' the order with Amazon and provide the payment information to us directly. Frankly, if Amazon's payment solution was less popular with my customers, I would discontinuing offering it, but unfortunately it's here to stay.

Currently it appears ShopSite only integrates with CBA. My enhancement request is for ShopSite to integrate with Amazon's ASP or FPS to accept payment without requiring the enforcement of the entire order flow process.

-- Mark

[DiveGearExpress]

One other important point about CBA. In using CBA, we are transmitting to Amazon the part numbers and prices of the products that our customers are purchasing, and Amazon is absolutely data-mining that information... there are numerous articles documenting this is the case, and Amazon itself has stated they do so. By switching to the other Amazon payment solution, we are no longer transmitting the entire contents of our shopping cart to Amazon for their benefit in competing against us.

[DiveGearExpress]

Amazon has now announced exactly the solution, "Login and Pay with Amazon",
https://payments.amazon.com//business/api-integration

This is pretty much Amazon's answer to PayPal. Amazon's payment services together with their Oauth service, eliminating checkout flow via a simplified payments only API. This is a much more desirable solution than Checkout by Amazon, and I hope ShopSite will move to implement it ASAP.