There are countless reasons your business may be offering a specific payment service to your customers, whether it’s to protect your business from fraud, to reduce cart abandonment or create a more convenient experience. Amazon Pay helps you with all of the above, while also offering your business an easier way to connect to hundreds of millions of active Amazon customers globally, including 150 million Prime customers.[1]
In this article, we would like provide a little more insight on the various possibilities of using Amazon Pay with your PSP and the different integration models behind the scenes.
What is a PSP?
Payment Service Provider are third party companies that provide services to manage payments. In the context of digital payments, PSPs facilitate the engagement between merchants and buyers, taking care of the processes related to the different types of payment methods such as direct debit, card processing (like VISA and Mastercard), local payment methods, and more. PSPs also provide 3DS capabilities, allowing a business to authenticate buyers, control risks and apply measures to reduce fraud. Payment Service Providers also enable and execute customer payments on the merchant’s behalf.
The services that the PSP offers go beyond the single support during the payment and post-payment. PSPs can provide the right tools for aggregating and consolidating payments, for account departments; support reconciliation and reporting of the all payments offered; or manage the payments, from a finance perspective.
What are the benefits of using a PSP with Amazon Pay?
By offering Amazon Pay through a PSP, merchants enable a frictionless interface for buyers. Following Amazon.com’s UX model, Amazon Pay’s service allows the buyer to complete a purchase in a matter of seconds on third party sites. Repetitive actions like typing a delivery address or the card number are complete in a few clicks. The Amazon Pay interface provides familiarity, confidence and speed to the buyer on a new ecommerce website or mobile app, and this can make the difference between completing the purchase or not.
Businesses experience the best of both worlds, taking advantage of Amazon Pay’s benefits as well as the value of PSPs services like unified consolidated reporting and transaction management.
How do PSPs and Amazon Pay play together and what are their roles?
PSPs and Amazon Pay have several overlapping roles, both manage different payment options, assessing fraud risk measures, provide panels to monitor and control transactions, providing reporting capabilities and more.
The general approach for integrating Amazon Pay and a PSP involves the PSP playing the role of a payment gateway, a technical facilitator for the Amazon Pay service. The Payment Service Provider will request the payment operations on behalf of the merchant, while Amazon Pay takes the responsibility of processing the payment. This model simplifies payment management allowing the merchant to access Amazon Pay Seller Central control panels to monitor and control their Amazon Pay account, while also allowing including Amazon Pay managed transactions with the PSP’s integrated console.
Which are the different technical solutions today?
If the merchant is not using a PSP, Amazon Pay’s service can integrate directly into their online store using the publicly available API; we refer to this approach as a self-developed integration. If the merchant website is based on an ecommerce service provider, it can be integrated using a plugin for their platform. A similar approach is used to integrate PSP based Amazon Pay solution.
PSP self-developed custom integration patterns
Front-end integration. A commonly used method to integrate Amazon Pay and PSP services is integrating Amazon Pay on the front end, and the PSP on the backend. The PSP adapts or provides a specific API to interface Amazon Pay. The benefit of this approach is the flexibility a merchant has when integrating the service. One drawback to this approach is the additional effort needed to integrate two different products and coordinate the support from two different external teams.
PSP hosted integration. A second PSP integration model is the PSP hosted service. The PSP provides the access to a hosted page containing the Amazon Pay UX and an API to control the service. This option is usually available for a merchant selling digital goods and services, like hotel booking, tickets and reservations. This approach offers the opposite pros and cons of the previous method with reduced effort but less customization.
Amazon Pay abstract layer API integration. We also offer a more developed, API based, hosted solution that allows merchants to accept digital and physical goods with Amazon Pay through some Payment Service Providers. This solution is also based on delegating the merchant’s payment UX externally. The API provides a generic abstract layer with the functionality to select the payment (receiving the billing and/or shipping address or general buyer data) and execute the payment. The benefit here is the reduced effort in development and zero maintenance costs.
Integrations using a Commerce Service Providers (CSP)
While integrating directly with an API on custom integrations is always feasible, a more practical solution if a business is using a CSP to install and configure a plugin. There are two main alternatives available.
One alternative is to use a plugin developed for a specific Payment Service Provider in partnership with Amazon Pay. These plugins are only available and valid for some Payment Service Providers. Plugins can allow for a strong integration, but available features may vary.
Another alternative is plugins developed for a specific CSP, but configurable for different PSPs. These plugins are based on the abstract layer integration and are capable of communicating with PSPs implementing the generic service. The benefit is a better integration with the CSP and a more up to date set of features. One drawback is a plugins availability. The plugin is configurable to use a specific PSP thanks to a configuration file provided by the PSP.
Can I use PSP and Amazon Pay?
Whether you’ve already integrated a standalone version of Amazon Pay and plan to move to a Payment Service Provider; or you are using a Payment Service Provider and want to offer your customers Amazon Pay, we are happy to advise on a solution for your project. Remember to build around the buyer experience you want to provide, the services you need as a merchant and the technical elements that will allow you to meet these goals.
Amazon Pay is integrated with several Payment Service Providers using different technical alternatives. This document provides only a slight overview of the different possibilities. We invite you to visit Amazon Pay and your Payment Service Providers web pages, or to contact your sales representative if you need further information.