Yep, I thought it would be of interest to the HN community, but most importantly I was interested about the comments/feedback/criticism of those who would potentially be using it.
I don't know what fraction of AWS users are outside of the US, but I'm sure it's not a completely trivial number. Please, find a way for us to use services like this. I know there's legal and accounting headaches involved, but they can't be any worse than the headaches involved in buying land and building datacenters, and you manage to do that just fine.
Seriously, my startup (tarsnap) is almost entirely AWS-based (the other exception is email -- I use sendgrid because SES is incompatible with public mailing lists) and I'd love to offer Amazon Payments as an option to my customers, but because I'm based in Canada it's not an option.
Yeah, there is a real opportunity here not to just read saurik's well-thought out reply, but respond to it. I have no doubt that he has sent very detailed emails to them, speaking as one engineer to another, and there is no better way to turn someone off than to ignore them after they go through such pains to make your product better.
I would love to have a minute to talk to you about this.
I recently took over a new but quickly growing webstore. Just two weeks ago we decided that we want to add "Payments by Amazon" as an option for our customers. We run a Magento Enterprise platform, so I was certain there is an extension for this.
Welcome to the rabbit hole... Do I want Checkout by Amazon or Payments by Amazon? Not clear as advantages of either or why I'd go with one over the other. After spending a few hours reading the differences I gave up and called friends until I got a contact at Amazon payments. Spoke with a super nice rep who explained to me why I shouldn't bother with CBA and look at Payments API instead... "But, I see there is a CBA Magento extension," I protested, can't I drop that in and be on my way? Turns out the extension is maintained by a 3rd party, and as far as I could tell and the rep confirmed it isn't really maintained at all, so even if we spent the money on it, no one could guarantee that it will work.
Fine, let's talk about payments, if Amazon is pushing payments api for merchants, there must be something for Magento users. I get told sorry, maybe there is something in the works but if I want anything up and running for the holiday season, I have to roll my own, and by the way please sign up for another Amazon service (I accidentally signed up for CBA, because it wasn't clear which I service I needed).
So here we are… building our own implementation for Magento. I know it's not Amazon's problem to support how payments are used, but if you want e-commerce merchants to take you up on this offering, some love for the ecosystem will go a long way and some clarity that CBA isn't being promoted anymore.
But I have to give Amazon credit, I've spoken to reps over at Selling on Amazon, FBA, Payments and they are all sharp, knowledgeable and eager to help. I can't say a single bad word about the people that interact with your business customers.
You're the CTO of Amazon, the revenue you're going to get from my business isn't even going to justify a rounding error on the balance sheet, but if you want to hear from the merchants, I'm happy to give you a view from the trenches.
I am a happy user of Amazon Simple Payments, which is, as promised, simple, works well, and has good support. As another user posts though, I'm a bit confused at the role the various payment solutions play. In other words, we now have Login and Pay, but also Amazon FPS. What's what?