Trusted channel

Businesses that are PCI compliant can rely on Amazon Payment Services as a secure payments partner. Use the payment card data that your business already holds and securely submit that data to Amazon Payment Services to process transactions effortlessly and efficiently.

As a PCI-compliant business you receive, manipulate, and store confidential payment card data on your server. Amazon Payment Services can collect confidential payment card data and it process it on your behalf. However, the trusted channel is a route that enables you to process payments using the payment card data you collected.

What is the trusted channel?

If you are a PCI-certified merchant you can collect your customers' credit card details on your checkout page and store the sensitive payment card data on your server. Read more about PCI compliance here.

PCI-compliant merchants can use the Amazon Payment Services trusted channel to submit payment card details so that Amazon Payment Services can execute transactions using the payment card data.

Note that Amazon Payment Services offers several alternative integration routes that, if implemented correctly, remove the need for a business to adhere to and pass PCI compliance standards. Read more about our integration routes here.

How does the trusted channel work?

When you use the trusted channel, you rely on your PCI compliance for the authority to handle sensitive payment card data. At the time that you need to process a payment, you send the payment card data you hold in an encrypted format to the Amazon Payment Services server. We process the payment transaction on your behalf.

Once we received the payment card data from your server we execute a payment transaction just as we ordinarily would.

The trusted channel is not activated by default. You must contact Amazon Payment Services to activate the trusted channel as we need to verify that your operations are PCI compliant.

Go to the full API reference

The above is an overview of the trusted channel. We provide more details outlining the usage of the trusted channel in our API reference.

Get in touch

We're ready to help you with your unique processing requirements. Get in touch with our support team to discuss how we can help you process payments more efficiently and more reliably -- just email us at merchantsupport-ps@amazon.com.