Ever since some juvenile delinquent cracked into my Paypal account and attempted to send $12,000 to a bunch of his friends in the former Soviet republics back in 2001, I’ve avoided Paypal at all costs. Unfortunately, that’s made doing small-scale ecommerce online rather difficult in the ensuing years.

There’s always the Payflow and other bank-based systems, but they make you do quite a bit more legwork on things like fraud. They also aren’t great solutions if you just need to process a few site subscriptions or the occasional Craigslist transaction. Google’s checkout is an option, but is more oriented to “stores” and is fairly rigid in its use.

That’s why the announcement of Amazon’s Flexible Payment Service struck me as interesting. And, what struck me as most interesting is the fact that, like their EC2 (on demand virtual server) and S3 (virtual storage) services, this is built from the ground up as an API for developers, not a consumer product.

So, at launch, this isn’t something users use directly. Rather, it’s something you can use to make payments for your subscription site easy or to integrate your own version of micropayments into your content management system, etc. From what I read in their documentation, they’re really providing as deeply flexible of a system as I’ve seen for collecting, moving around and distributing money online.

I really like that approach that Amazon takes. By starting with an API, they don’t lock themselves into a specific solution. They leave it open to innovation and provide a platform instead of a packaged approach. This is far more likely to result in interesting applications than providing rigid “Buy Now” buttons that get shoehorned into sites where the concept doesn’t really apply.

The API is in limited beta at the moment, but there is already PHP code for working with the service if you sign up for and get into the beta. I know I’m looking at it seriously for some subscription/member sites that I’m working on.