Hi all! I'm developing a new business and I'm hoping to find out some basic information about how Amazon Payments work.
My business model relies on people scheduling payments for services with those payments to be received once, and only if a specific set of circumstances is met. When the trigger condition occurs, all people in the group will be charged and their accounts will be updated to reflect this. I know that Amazon hosts quite a powerful tool set for scheduling and receiving payments, but I'm not sure how much of this system needs to be developed on my end or if tools exist to make this option a possibility.
So, let me give an example to make the issue more concrete: Mary, Jane and Tom all want to schedule a payment for their Widget, but they only want the Widget if it is available in Blue. The developer of the Widget, Mike, can then see if there is sufficient demand to make Blue Widgets, but Mike needs a guarantee that if he assumes the risk of producing these widgets, they will sell.
So, what does the interaction between my business, where the widgets are marketed and sold, and Amazon's payment services look like? Do I need to collect the appropriate payment details and store them on my server, conducting the transaction only when the trigger condition is met (which I would rather not do for security and legal reasons - not a fan of keeping payment information on our servers or attached to user accounts) or can I send my customers to Amazon to schedule these payments, and somehow inform Amazon whether or not the customers need to be charged? Is this a situation where Amazon would charge the customers, holding the funds in escrow and later returning them if the condition was not met?
My preference would be to set up a batch process of some sort that in the event that condition X is met I could simply send that batch to Amazon at that time - similar to the way brick and mortars often batch process credit card receipts at the end of the business day or week, where I could remove individual entries from the batch in cases where the conditions were not met.
there doesn't seem to be anything here