Comments on: Amazon FPS vs PayPal Express for a marketplace app

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:34:47 +0000

So what did you end up using for the site? I’m working on a similar project (processing a cart shared between individual ‘merchants’) and am curious how you handled it.

By: Which online payment service? « Data Driven with a Human Touch

Which online payment service? « Data Driven with a Human Touch — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 22:37:30 +0000

[...] Amazon FPS vs PayPal Express for a marketplace app [...]

By: Robert Mann

Robert Mann — Sun, 31 May 2009 16:05:02 +0000

Hi, as Dheeraj, I cannot find how to use it for Marketplace apps. Can you please give a good link to read?

By: Dheeraj Akula

Dheeraj Akula — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:53:48 +0000

Great thoughts here. I had been struggling to avoid the double charges in my marketplace app. I was going through the documentation on Paypal Express. Not able to find how to use it for Marketplace apps. Can you please give a good link to read?

By: Dheeraj Akula

Dheeraj Akula — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:41:27 +0000

Great thoughts here. I had been struggling to avoid the double charges in my marketplace app. Does anyone know which is a better choice for international transactions?

By: Micah

Micah — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:38:16 +0000

Calvin,

IMHO, it’s better to pay for simplicity. So, I’d rather pay higher fees and get it developed quickly. For an unproven startup, this can be important just to see if anyone will bite. If they do, you can start to implement multiple payment pathways to allow your customers to use their payment method of choice.

Note: this only applies to transaction fees. I’m not a huge fan of paying big setup fees like a lot of merchant accounts charge. PayPal, Amazon, and Google have the right model: no setup, pay as you go.

By: Calvin Yu

Calvin Yu — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:18:56 +0000

We’re looking at using FPS for Skribit – mainly b/c their rates are better. In your case, I don’t imagine that applies much since you’re passing along that fee. I’m looking at FPS as having a lower rate, but w/ higher setup fee (in the it takes for me to implement the solution). Then the question is if the higher setup cost is worth the lower transaction rate.

By: Micah

Micah — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:44:51 +0000

Nap,

We actually have used FPS and Remit, and can say for a fact that it’s dicey. We did the work almost a year ago, and it seems like things have progressed since they, but we still feel a little burned.

In any case, thanks for the heads up!

By: nap

nap — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:07:17 +0000

We evaluated FPS for one of our client projects and although it’s attractive it’s also rather complicated for simple marketplace applications. Remit is working to make that simpler, from what I’ve heard, but I haven’t personally used it yet. It looked very much like a work in progress at the time.

My solution was to use Amazon’s SimplePay, which worked well for our situation. It’s basically a streamlined version of FPS that is much more constrained. Only recently was marketplace support added to the service by Amazon. In any case, there’s a Gem available (thanks to Nathaniel Bibler), and I added marketplace service support to it a few weeks back so you’ll now be able to use it for building marketplace solutions as well. Check it out at http://simplepay.rubyforge.org/

We’ll be launching our first (small) project using this work pretty soon. Good luck!