I've been reading over the Amazon Flexible Payments Service; especially the Advanced Quick Start (
https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=devfps/advanced) features. It looks very promising. I especially like the part where the seller can get payment authorization for multiple or recurring payments. It's basically the same as PayPal's recurring payment feature BUT you can specify the amount that should be billed to the user each month. This would work great for me, as I will be offering a pay-as-you-go service where the user will only need to pay based on how much they used in the previous month.
How hard do you think it would be to integrate with Amazon's Flexible Payments Service? It looks like they have all the same features as PayPal, such as IPN.
I was thinking it could work something like this:
- User places order for ABC Recurring Pay-As-You-Go Subscription
- User is sent to Amazon to setup the billing authorization but nothing is actually billed an amount yet
- User is sent back to nBill. nBill leaves the order in pending status?
- Each month admin would login to Amazon to process usage billing? Admin could create invoice in nBill and mark payment as received?
- Or maybe (this would be amazing), Admin could create invoice in nBill, select an option to bill customer's existing Amazon Payment Agreement, and upon successful IPN mark invoice as paid! (I'm sure this would be a good bit of work though...)
Maybe it would be better to have the Amazon FPS integration handled totally outside of nBill. If a customer wants to sign-up for a recurring pay-as-you-go subscription, they must first login to their account and then click the Amazon button to setup billing authorization. Amazon would return customer to a setup directions page. At the end of the month, admin would login directly to Amazon to bill client? nBill could then be used to manually create an invoice for record keeping purposes. Invoice would be immediately marked as paid-in-full. This would like have to be a custom project, as Amazon only provides sample PHP files.
I'm just thinking out loud here... Any ideas?
-Andrew
EDIT: I've been doing some reading and this Amazon FPS Advanced Quick Start is pretty powerful it seems. With just one authorization, the seller can continuously bill the user for varying amounts. This might be a good addition module for nBill. This would allow us to create invoices and tell those invoices to immediately bill the client using the already on file authorization through Amazon FPS Advanced Quick Start! Wow! And with IPN, the invoices could be immediately marked at paid.
