Day 2 session: The Future of PayPal

There are so many different uses cases and payment methods coming!

PayPal X platform: the open global payments platform for developers.

The main offerings:

• Payment facilitation: pay anyone, receive from anyone
• Account management: identify users, permissions, accounts
• Information and reporting: Notifications, reporting, search

ADAPTIVE PAYMENTS API: the basic building blocks enabling payment

Pay (transfer funds), PaymentDetails; Preapproval (agreement signup); PreapprovalDetails, CancelPreapproval.

A sampling of use cases:

• send money (social networks, eBay, etc)
• split payments (distributing sender's single payment to several recipients, several countries)
• bill payments
• points and miles
• invoice payments
• scheduled payments
• money transfers
• mobile device payments

The easiest case: simply send money. There's a sender, there's a receiver.

Preapproved Payments:  In this realm, you via your app are authorized (preapproved) to make payment on behalf of the sender. Instead of the sender having to approve each transaction, you get the sender's approval ahead of time, per whatever details are appropriate for your business agreement (e.g. the sender approves, up front, "automatic transfer of $X from my account every other month"). You interact with the sender and with PayPal as the receiver, on behalf of the sender.

Parallel Payments:  You can pay multiple recipients at once. This enable partnership opportunities, marketplace payments, service fees, multi-merchant checkout, etc. And there transparency for the sender is that the sender ends up seeing ALL of the details of where the money actually went.

Chained payments:  In this scheme, there is a single initial recipient of the sender's money (oh, and the sender only sees payment to that single receiver). Then that single recipient passes the funds on to one or more recipients.

Combining:  You can combine chained payment and preapproved payment. But you cannot combine parallel payment and preapproval in the same transaction.

Here's a sample of the flow.  You have a created a rental application for use by property management to collect rents and then pay the owners of properties and the folks who do the garden maintenance at each place.

1. The sender interacts with the rental app, and the rental app interacts with PayPal.
2. Secondary receivers: owner of property and guy doing the gardening.
3. PayPal returns a transaction token (the "Pay Key").
4. The rental app redirects to the PayPal web site, and the sender approves payment. PayPal distributes the money per the rental app's instructions.
5. PayPal notifies both the rental app and the sender.

You can create Personal and Premier accounts. You can create Business accounts. Add funding sources. Verify accounts.

All this helps you streamline the user experience and increase conversion (folks don't drop off of the PayPal page just because they don't have a PayPal account). Supporting mechanism:  PayPal creates an inactive account to support the transaction.

SOAP, XML, NVP, JSON. Open source SDKs and toolkits. Mobile embedded payments library. And more!  Watch for it.

John Darrow
API Tech Docs and Tools