Online payments blizzard looms as PayPal APIs launch

Beverley Head
Thursday, 08 October 2009 04:50

IT Industry - Development

More than 800 developer partners – 20 of which are Australian - have signed up for the APIs which will provide them with access to PayPal’s payments platform, ahead of the official release in San Francisco next month, heralding a blizzard of new online payments applications.  

The high demand can in part be sheeted home to the fact that it’s only those developers who turn up to PayPal’s US conference early next month who will get access to the APIs before 2010 when they go on general release. The beta of the Adaptive Payments API was released in July, and more APIs will be released on November 3.

In Sydney this week, Naveed Anwar, the senior director of PayPal’s developer network programme, who has been in the job just six weeks after fulfilling similar roles at AOL and Netscape, told iTWire that his ambition for the programme was that; “When someone thinks about the monetisation of an application the company they should look at by default is PayPal - where the transaction is made so easy that they don’t look anywhere else.”

The company, which was bought by eBay in 2002, announced in July that it was offering Australian e-commerce developers the code and APIs to access its processing gateway. It already offers payment capabilities in 19 currencies and 190 countries around the world.

According to Anwar; “The power of PayPal is that organisations don’t have to deal with the banking regulations. Payment is really really complex. If companies have to spend time on chargeback or tax treatments then they can’t concentrate on the core experience.”

Using PayPal’s APIs would allow them to “Concentrate on the applications and experience they are building, not on the payments platform.”

Anwar argues that by hooking up to PayPal’s platform, the payments complexity is taken care of. “This is a globally open transaction platform to allow open innovation,” he said.

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