It looks like Amazon has decided since they have gone to the trouble of putting together a sophisticated purchasing system to sell goods, they might as well make money giving people access to their system and computing capacity.
According to Non-profit Tech blog, Amazon’s offer of access to their Flexible Payment System can be a boon to non-profits. As a person who is familiar with these types of systems, Allan at Non-Profit Tech Blog clearly sees more possibilities than do I. I suspect that the opportunities I see are too grounded in what is already being done rather than what is possible.
The benefits I can immediately see are that the system they offer uses their already familiar interface. If a person has an account with Amazon, they can use the credit card on file to purchase from you.
Because of all the options and conditions you can impose upon sales, it appears as if it would be easy to create all sorts of discount packages based on innumerable combinations of things people ordered. Helpful for subscription ticket packages as well as museum gift shops.
From what I can tell it would be a great tool to use with donors who want to spread their donation out across many months because it allows you to automatically charge people on a regular basis.
The people I think it might be a real valuable tool for are central arts councils in rural or suburban areas that fundraise for member organizations who don’t have the resources to do their own development. The Amazon tool allows for the transfer of money from one person straight to a third party.
So a donor could visit the arts council website and have their donation go into Small Town Historical Society’s bank account. The arts council can choose to have a percentage removed to help pay the IT person who keeps the donor system running if they like.
If you have a savvy IT person on staff or on your board of directors, it might be worth having them look at the entry and Amazon’s page to determine what the other possibilities might be.
Hi there, thanks for the mention. Don’t forget to take a look at Google Checkout for Nonprofits. It released a few days after my post about Amazon FPS. Granted, it’s not as sophisticated as Amazon FPS, but Google Checkout will be free until the end of 2008. That’s right — free as in no setup charges, no monthly fees and no transaction fees. It’s a heck of a value proposition. Amazon FPS has its merits but it ain’t free. I’m hoping that Google Checkout’s announcement will force Amazon’s hand in giving out their system for free to nonprofits as well.