PayPal Opens Up API To Developers

[engine]

PayPal Opens Up API To Developers [telegraph.co.uk]

Scott Thompson, PayPal’s president, made the announcement at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. He said: “I am proud to say in just two weeks, PayPal will be the first global online payment service to open its platform to everyone.

"We hope and expect to unleash the power of digital money regardless of the currency and regardless of the platform in any country in the world.”
Mr Thompson added: “PayPal will be the first truly global online payment service to open its platform to everyone. We’ll be releasing APIs [application programming interface] that will allow anyone in the industry to create new ways to reinvent the $30 trillion payments industry.”

[httpwebwitch]

WOW.

Well, PayPal already has an API of sorts. But now, will we be able to process funds start-to-finish without sending our users to paypal.com?

This is huge! And fantastic! I can already think of two sites I own that *need* this.

[wheel]

Opening stuff up to developers is always a good idea. This can help seal their dominance into the future.

[fargo1999]

Well, PayPal already has an API of sorts. But now, will we be able to process funds start-to-finish without sending our users to paypal.com?

I think it's now possible to do it with Paypal pro. Even though I tend to think most users may trust more to pay on paypal.com website rather than on the merchant's domain.

[pontifex]

I find this so important that I am sending our chief coder over to SFO for the dev conf in 2 weeks (from Germany, by the way)!

P!

[aspdaddy]

I think it's now possible to do it with Paypal pro

They mean opening it up to 3rd party application developers like mobile phones, x-box etc

[moltar]

So what kind of stuff is going to be possible? There is a real lack of detail there :)

[aleksl]

this could be BIG

[jcaron]

They have been building up a lot of hype on this for a few months now, I hope it'll be as good as promised and not just a half-cooked thingy that can't do much of anything. Anyway, I'm pretty sure many people will be disappointed, the payment industry is clearly not open enough (and for good reason) that they would let anyone do whatever they want.

Wait and see...

[SEOtop10]

Now this is very interesting to me. We have been building web apps for mobile access and being able to access Paypal internals from a mobile phone will be powerful.

[physics]

Sign me up :)

[Petrogold]

The world has been changing since with the internet development. I wrote to paypal why they did not think globally before. It took me many years to get their approval for an account I needed to transact where only paypal pay was accepted. Now many est. already send money on their clients' behalf. (WU), express money etc.
Hope paypal will rethink & do flexible way business for good growth they missed so far.

[jwolthuis]

But now, will we be able to process funds start-to-finish without sending our users to paypal.com?

No, this is incorrect. PayPal never said this, or implied this. The capability you mention has already been available with Website Payments Pro for several years.

Their new API is PayPal-only, and *always* requires redirection to paypal.com. Their new API offers lots of additional features, but a visit to paypal.com is still required.