PayPal used its inaugural PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference in San Francisco to officially announce the PayPal X program to release APIs allowing developers to integrate PayPal seamlessly into third-party applications. The new PayPal APIs allow developers to engage customers directly within their own applications rather than forcing them to port users off to the actual PayPal site. The expanded functionality will help PayPal to compete against similar online payment services from Amazon and Google.
Users who don't even use PayPal can actually sign up for PayPal within the third-party application and begin making PayPal payments seamlessly from within the third-party application. Part of the goal of opening PayPal to developers is also to expand the types of transactions PayPal is used for to include things like paying rent, or employee payroll. PayPal wants to make it easier for developers to leverage its payment system, ostensibly making PayPal a sort of de facto currency for the Web. PayPal also has its eye on smart phones and wants to incorporate PayPal payments into mobile applications. PayPal is an established name in online transactions.
Google Checkout is already working on mobile devices, and Nokia is working on its own mobile payment system, Nokia Money. It built a reputation for providing a safe and secure means of making payments for things like EBay purchases. There are fees involved and some users have taken issue with those fees (including recently adding fees without notice for services that were previously free). Rather than adopt PayPal (and the fees that come with it) for online payment, Amazon and Google have developed homegrown online payment systems. It worked so well and got so popular that EBay eventually bought PayPal in 2002. PayPal doesn't provide the service as a charity though. Google and Amazon are both online gorillas, and Amazon is a huge online retail site, so the competition is a threat to PayPal. The new PayPal X API's provide an even more integral and seamless opportunity for SMB's to leverage PayPal for both incoming and outgoing financial transactions.
A couple years ago PayPal introduced the Website Payments Pro program aimed at providing small and medium businesses (SMB) with a platform for conducting secure online transactions. Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience. He tweets as @PCSecurityNews and provides tips, advice and reviews on information security and unified communications technologies on his site at tonybradley.com.
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