Today we are rolling out the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (or Amazon FPS) in beta form. The "good idea" has become a reality and developers now have yet another way to build scalable, profitable online businesses.

We've taken all that we know about dealing with credit cards, bank accounts, fraud checking and customer service and wrapped it all up into one convenient package.

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.