TipJoy is closing down. Users can still cash out from the system, but no new transactions are allowed.

We were rooting for TipJoy–heck, their API contest inspired us to get moving on ProcrasDonate–so we’re sorry things didn’t work out for them. Nonetheless, the change of plans has lead us to integrate with another exciting payment system.

Amazon Flexible Payment System

We decided to immediately use Amazon’s Flexible Payment System (FPS), while keeping our options open for integrating with other services down the road. You can vote for other payment systems on our feedback forum.

The move from TipJoy’s simple REST API and direct developer contact to Amazon’s five 130 page Quick Start Guides took a little while to load into my brain. Even after I thought we were on the right track, we learned some details (thanks forum!) that caused us to rethink how to use FPS.

At the end of the day, though, I am excited and pleased. Amazon FPS is a secure, feature-rich system that is unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Limits

The way we use their API is such that users authorize us, or rather our software, to make payments on their behalf–up to a limit. When that limit is reached, the user has to reauthorize us.

One unfortunate Amazon FPS limit is that recipients must explicitly authorize us to pay them. Furthermore, when we make payments to recipients on behalf of a user, these payments can only be to the recipients known at the time of user authorization.

This means we can no longer pay recipients, such as content providers, on the fly. This in itself isn’t a problem: the extension keeps track of all pledges. Unfortunately, in order to turn pledges to newly registered recipients into real donations, the user has to reauthorize payments. Re-authorization takes less than a minute, but, like any task that confronts busy, multitasking users, it has a high activation cost.

I expect we’ll be modifying our registration and authorization pipeline quite a bit as we experiment with the optimal mix of efficient, non-intimidating, trust-inspiring and fun.

Non-Profit Outreach

I am suuuper excited by all the non-profit outreach Clay is doing! Too much blogging from me for right now, though, so I’ll just leave you looking forward to good news on the way.

Proudly procrasdonating,

Lucy.