As we begin a new year full of opportunities, many developers or product owners out there might be thinking through their next big bets for their CX and asking the question “What are my customers going to be asking for?” You might be wondering how you’re going to make time to evaluate, build, and scale your next ecommerce project; well Amazon Pay wants to make that whole process less painful for you by introducing Sandbox-First Accounts.
In the past, Amazon Pay required you to go through the complete sign-up and onboarding routine to try out our APIs. With Sandbox-First accounts, you can quickly go from reading our developer documentation, to testing out an implementation. If you like what you see, you can easily promote your account from sandbox to a production-ready. This means no ‘wasted time’, no requirements around tax or corporate finances, just a quick and easy way to sign up and start testing.
To take advantage of this new feature, the first thing you’ll need to do is sign up. Sign-up consists of three simple steps:
Step 1: Fill out our account form
Make sure you include your business’s name and an email address that you want to use specifically for Amazon Pay:
Step 2: Agree to our Terms and Conditions
As part of agreeing to terms and conditions, you can (optionally) supply a list of safe-listed domains where you’re going to be doing your testing. Supplying a domain here will restrict the button to only showing up on URLs under the specified domain:
Step 3: Start developing
After signing up, you’ll be redirected to Integration Central, our one-stop shop for generating your API credentials, with resources to get started with Amazon Pay through an ecommerce solution provider or as you build a custom integration.
With your newly created account, you will be able to start developing or testing an Amazon Pay integration without providing your Tax, Payment, or other Business information. You will be able to try out and explore all of the same functionality that already exists today, without worrying about providing business information right away or going live before you are ready.
Once you’re done testing – you can finish signing up to start accepting Amazon Pay transactions. Start by providing your existing account credentials to your business partner (or enter them yourself if you’re the one signing up). Then complete the tax information, payment information, and sign-up process as usual.
By using the same credentials you used to create the Sandbox-First account, you will be able to sign in to the Integration Central app once more, and create a new set of Production-Ready API credentials. That way, you can keep a Sandbox environment using one set of API credentials (i.e. your Sandbox-Only credentials), and your Production environment using another!
For more tips and tricks for building a great ecommerce experience, check out 7 tactics to optimise your custom Amazon Pay integration or how to design your business payments experience.