Amazon.com just announced its Flexible Payment Service (FPS), a direct competitor to PayPal (now owned by eBay) and Google Checkout:
In much the same way that S3 and EC2 allow developers to forget about leasing space in data centers, buying servers and negotiating for bandwidth, FPS shields developers from many of the messy and complex issues which arise when dealing with money. Once again, we take care of the "muck" and developers get to focus on being innovative and creative.
Interestingly, Amazon's pricing is on par with PayPal's: 2.9% + $0.30 for most credit card transactions, while Google is trying to attract merchants by waiving all transaction fees for its (admittedly less flexible) Checkout service for the rest of 2007.
The enterprise software world is mostly comprised of MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle). Similarly, the web services world is shaping up to be a battle among "ebayahooglezon" (eBay, Yahoo, Google, and Amazon). So where's Yahoo in all of this? Apparently they've decided to take on YouTube.
Let's get it on!
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