Programming Amazon Web Services

Chapter 11. FPS Transactions and Accounts

Performing FPS Transactions

The Flexible Payments Service (FPS) offers a number of application programming interface (API) operations for performing, reviewing, and reversing fund transfers between Amazon Payments accounts. To perform a transaction, the service must be provided with three tokens that represent the authorized payment instructions for the sender, recipient, and caller in the transaction. The service retrieves these instructions, and confirms that the proposed transaction complies with the rules they express; if so, it performs the transaction, causing money to change hands and an FPS transaction fee to be incurred.

The money transferred by a transaction operation is paid into the recipient’s Amazon Payments account. Money cannot be deposited directly into the recipient’s bank account or credit card, except for refund operations, in which funds can be replaced in the credit card account from which they were drawn. The recipient of an FPS payment can withdraw the funds from his Amazon Payments account to an external bank account through the Amazon Payments account management web site, or he can use funds from the Amazon account for purchases.

FPS can transfer values between 0.1¢ and $10,000. When this book was written, transactions could only be made in U.S. currency.

FPS will only perform a transaction when the sender and recipient tokens it uses are installed in two different Amazon Payments accounts. It is not possible ...