Programming Amazon Web Services

Building a Marketplace Application

FPS can be used to build a marketplace application in which you do not send or receive money yourself, but instead mediate transactions between third parties who act as the senders and receivers of funds. In this scenario, your application could enable third-party vendors to sell their items through your marketplace. You could make this arrangement profitable by charging the vendors fees for the transaction services you provide.

To create a marketplace, you must enter into an agreement with the vendors who will sell items through the marketplace. At a minimum, the vendors must install a recipient token in their Amazon Payments account, so you can pay them money on behalf of customers. The CBUI offers a pipeline that allows third parties to install recipient tokens through the web interface. The Recipient pipeline is based on the same URI-generation mechanism discussed earlier (see Acquiring Third-Party Tokens” in Chapter 10). We will describe the recipient pipeline in more detail shortly.

Charging Fees for Access to Your Marketplace

Before you embark on creating a marketplace application, you must review the acceptable use provisions for Amazon Payments accounts and the FPS in general. Certain kinds of transactions or payment arrangements that you may intend to apply in a marketplace scenario are expressly prohibited by FPS. For example, you may not:

• act as an intermediary who holds a sender’s funds before relaying them to the recipient.

• resell Amazon’s ...