Opening Up Payments At The First Annual PayPal X Innovate Conference.
November 11, 2009 :: Kenneth Yeung
Earlier this month, PayPal held its first developers conference designed to promote its new initiative. This was perhaps a ground-breaking program for the e-commerce and virtual wallet company as it announced that it was opening up its API for developers to experiment with and build applications and systems around. Having supported now over 20 currencies worldwide, PayPal is poised to take the next steps into reaching out to more people and make processing of payments online easier than ever before. Of course, they’re going to have to compete with the number one form of transactions to date: cash.
We are definitely moving into a cash-less society as is apparent by everything being done digitally. PayPal hopes that by making it easier for developers to integrate its system into their applications through the API, then more people will use PayPal for e-commerce processing. And why not? During the first day’s opening keynote (which lasted about three hours), several people talked about the success of PayPal and what this new movement will result in. Surprisingly, they even brought out several companies on stage to showcase their successful integration. The customer testimonials were a pretty powerful example that the API can lead to success stories.
Other noted items at the PayPal X Innovate Conference include updated enhancements to its Adaptive Payments API including: (source eBayInk Blog)
Currency conversion: Fast, easy global payment apps, automatically converting currencies using current exchange rates.
Pay Anyone: For financial and other institutions to let their customers send money when logged in to their bank accounts. Their customers won’t need a PayPal account to use the service.
Pre-approvals: Enables developers to create reusable payments agreements between buyers and sellers. While payment approval happens online, the actual money movement can occur offline at different intervals, and through multiple devices that are not necessarily Internet-connected at the time.
Send Money: Developers can build person-to-person (P2P) solutions or business-to-business (B2B) payment applications on their platform of choice – whether it’s the mobile phone or a social networking site.
Chained Payments: Developers can take a cut or distribute funds from PayPal payments as they happen.
Parallel payments: Developers can enable buyers to send money to several people in one payment, which is ideal for purchasing multiple items from different sellers, or even for payroll applications.
PayPal has even updated its Services Payments platform by making it a bit easier for companies and developers using their API. The new structured pricing is now a flat fee of 50 cents for service transactions funded by a bank account or PayPal account balance, “with a three-day settlement period; or a 0.75 percent fee for service transactions funded by a bank account or PayPal account balance, with instant settlement.”
And not to make it seem as if PayPal was going to leave the developers out in the cold, the company also announced the launch of a new website dedicated to supporting these development efforts. Known as X.com, this social network/resource website will house any and all documentation needed to make integration easier and even has the ability to connect developers to one another to help each other out with questions they may have regarding the platform.
From various sessions influenced by the PayPal platform where the team discussed and showcased how to integrate it in multiple instances to inspiring keynotes from not only technology evangelist, industry thought-leader & founder of O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, but also a venture capitalist panel moderated by Om Malik, the PayPal X Innovate Conference offered a great deal of information and held some good prospects for great applications to be developed in the future to possibly make our e-commerce lives much easier and better.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at the production of this inaugural event for PayPal. The setup was pretty impressive and greatly executed. Unfortunately the wireless Internet in the building wasn’t as spectacular on the first day, but the organizers realized the issue and had it resolved on the second half of the conference. Perhaps the icing on the cake was that they even announced a PayPal challenge where they’re encouraging developers to create the most innovative application and the winner will receive $150,000 in cash & transaction fees. From great sessions to inspiring talks, PayPal has set the stage for moving forward in the next generation of e-commerce and reducing the size of people’s wallets.
Let’s hope it pays out.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Kenneth Yeung.
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