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Amex for Developers

developer.americanexpress.com

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Re: Amex for Developers

#91

Post by joe-stanton »

moduspwnens14 wrote: post #84

Imagine this potential future with me. At first, it's just Amex. Then, to remain competitive, other major card vendors do something similar. Most of us (developers) still use something like Stripe for simplicity, but libraries start popping up that abstract away the vendor-specific APIs and make it easy to use them. Long term, though, as more and more payments are handled electronically and online, this opens the doo…

Visa/Mastercard may well be forced to try something like this in order to survive. Banks are opening up their own API's for P2P payments (at least within the EU due to legislation). This could completely negate the need for intermediate "payment networks" (except the following).

However - I don't think you'll see a proliferation of new payment methods. The biggest problem here would be fraud mitigation, so it'd need to be a payment provider the merchant deems trustworthy enough.

Interesting times ahead. Amex are just doing the bare minimum to keep up here.

Re: Amex for Developers

#92

Post by x13 »

Zelphyr wrote: post #23
WhitneyLand wrote: post #5

Wow, talk about too little too late. This kind of late to the party strategy is why startups will always be needed to lead innovation. The irony is the highest ranking person at AmEx who really understands this is probably a pretty smart guy who had to fight and lobby for years to rally enough support to make this happen. edit: Its worse than I thought. A quick search shows they brought in high level talent from Goog…

I've heard how Amex can be from a friend who has them as a client. They refuse to let her host their instance of her product on AWS because Amex's security team supposedly hasn't vetted AWS yet. This despite the kinds of customers Amazon already hosts on AWS (the CIA comes to mind). Not to mention that she has several other very large banks as clients that don't have a problem at all being hosted on AWS. Or that exac…

"piddly little local co-locted hosting company" uh, no - they use Akamai and Cloudflare for CDN's.. Have any facts to back this up?

Re: Amex for Developers

#93

Post by reubano »

API Standard Practices

Generally, our public APIs follow a standard set of best practices:

- All APIs follow REST principles.

- JSON is the standard payload. Some APIs may include additional formats such as XML and in such cases media type headers are used to specify your preference.

- Due to the sensitive nature of most data that is exchanged with American Express, you will commonly find HTTP POST methods used where you may expect to find either GET or DELETE methods used. The primary purpose is to prevent sensitive search criteria from being used in the Query string, moving it instead to the Body.

----------------

So they claim to be RESTful yet not support GET or DELETE calls. Do they even realize what they are saying?

Re: Amex for Developers

#94

Post by titomc »

brianbreslin wrote: post #17

So can someone explain to me why one would use amex over stripe or braintree? Or why would one use mastercard's API or Visa's? They all have similar APIs right?

AMEX is closed loop network. The advantage possibly would be huge troves of data about customer spending habits, if they expose those in future(obviously without PII)

Re: Amex for Developers

#95

Post by OliverJones »

ecommerceguy wrote: post #14
OliverJones wrote: post #4

Hmm. For the typical card-not-present (online) use case, stripe.com and paypal do a pretty darn good job of processing AMEX payment cards, as well as the others. Tokenization is vital in this age of cybermiscreants. Ya don't want customer payment card data in your dbms. The stripe.com API offers tokenization, and it offers the ability to send and validate data like zip/postcode, cvv and street address to cut fraud. T…

>And these service providers offer the >highest The only people I've ever met that recommend Stripe are developers. The only people I'd recommend Square to are merchants whose avg ticket is less than $5 or are borderline hobbyists. The number of hardcore PP users has dropped significantly in the last 5 years, in my experience, to less than 10%.

A SaaS business I know of switched TO stripe.com from a more traditional processor / acquirer scheme for payment card processing, and saved a bundle. The traditional scheme had several layers of fees; the payment processor and then Visa / MC / AMEX, then the bank. Different card flavors (rewards cards, etc) offered different fee levels. Predicting fee levels was a probabilistic task.

Switching to Stripe, they got a two-tier one layer fee scheme. One tier for AMEX and a lower tier for MC/VISA.

The fee burden was noticeably lower with Stripe, too. the business I mention requested a fee discount and got it based on annual volume. But it was cheaper even without the discount.

So, where are the lower fees?

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