WebProNews

This latest addition to an infrastructure lineup of S3 and EC2 (data storage/transfer and distributed computing, respectively) enhances Amazon's strength as a powerful destination for developers. A "good idea" about making Amazon's payment processing capabilities available as a web service came to fruition. The online retailer has been actively developing this functionality.

An announcement from Amazon made the rumors official. Their Flexible Payments Service entered a limited public beta period today.

One interesting possibility for the new service emerged from Amazon's description of the service. Micro-payments have been tried by other companies, but perhaps now is the time for them to become a viable option for online content creators:

Developers can create payment instructions that are as simple or complex as they desire. For example, creating a relatively complex business model around micro-payments is easy to do with Amazon FPS.

Our aggregation feature lets you track and aggregate micro-payments into a single payment transaction, saving on transaction processing costs and avoiding having to build complex ledger functionality into your own applications.

Without this capability micro-payments would be difficult or cost-prohibitive.

The ideal outcome for the Flexible Payments Service would have people signing up for Amazon Payments. It's positioned as a service that can be used to make payments on third party sites, similar to market leader PayPal and rival Google Checkout.

FreshBooks signed on as an early integrator of the Flexible Payments Service, and blogged about the micro-payment aspect of it:

Anyone who has ever used Amazon Web Services has noticed Amazon can bill as low as only 1 cent a month. If you’ve ever been jealous they can do that and you can’t, well, now you can.

With FPS, you can now bill as low as 1 cent, and Amazon will charge a transaction fee of one quarter of one cent. Bring back the penny candies, because this changes the game for the entire web. There may have been micropayment solutions before, but none backed by a major trustworthy player like Amazon.

This looks like the cusp of something many of us have wanted to see on the Internet since the earliest days of e-commerce. Micro-payments have never realized their potential. It's far too early to claim victory here, but it looks a lot closer than it did even a year ago.