Overcoming the Challenges of Cross-Platform Development

Overcoming the Challenges of Cross-Platform Development

 

This was a engaging town hall type session, featuring representatives from eBay, PayPal, and LinkedIn.

 

The following are some of the major bullet points of what was discussed today.

 

What products are PayPal doing?

 

Consumer Application

    Send/Invoince Money

    In-person payments via Bump

Merchant Checkout

    In app, rich authentication

    1-click payment, sign up and sign in

    Single Integration

    Auto-Detect mobile web

 

PayPal's global perspective

    Looking at trends worldwide

    Emerging markets is where mobile payments is taking off

 

Platform Survey

    iPhone

        Flagship platform for PayPal

        Easier for C/C++ & Mac developers

        Walled garden

            Good: Protected, unoform platform

            Bad: TOS causes confusion with every change

    Android

        Flagshio platform by 2011

        Easier for Java Developers

        Fragemtation - only going to get worse

        "Open Platform"

            Good: Flexible and adaptable

            Bad: Evolving security model

Mobile Web

    Mobile Web helps with portability

    Rendering technology helps with fragmentation

    Webkit has paved the way for great experience

    HTML5 brings rich experience

 

LinkedIn

    LinkedIn 3.0 for iphone launched this year

    Professionals are rarely at their desks

    In one year from now, the mobile web to be ubiquitous throughout various platforms

 

eBay

    Selling an item every second, selling 2-3 Ferrari's a month

    Upgrades to apps are being 100% adapted within a month of availability

    On all platforms via NetBiscuits

    1200 unique devices hit the mobile website per month

Hackathon: Quick and Easy MPL Integration using Titanium JavaScript Developer

Take your JavaScript and generate native application for a variety of mobile devices, IOS, Android, etc. Less code and it's JavaScript FTW!

A Native Function call takes several lines of Titanium JavaScript code.

For developers, they can add an array of mobile commerce functionality for their apps quickly and easily.

It's easy as 1,2,3

Step 1: Include the PayPal library in your project and in your reference code

Step 2: Add a button

Step 3: Wire the PayPal button, to it's capability via PayPal payments

Start today, go to: http://www.appcelerator.com

eBay API fundamentals

In this session, we're learning about eBay's API's and what we can do with them.

The eBay API's are the largest eCommerce opportunities
90 million users
27 million sellers

Find and purchase irked
List items and manage inventory

API offerrings
Trading API: targeted to he seller
Large merchant services API: targeted to merchants with large volumes of inventory and transactions
Best Match: analyze areas of improvements, what is the competetition doing
Product Services: metadata service, create selling applications
Finding: find items on eBay
Platform notifications: an item sells, you find out
Client Alerts: make a Json request to pick up notifications
Open eBay Applications: embed your web applications right on the eBay production site

You can get started using the API's by going to developer.eBay.com

1. Sign up
2. Get your keysets
3. Create a user token

Remember that we also have great testing environment in the sandbox. Test your apps before they go live. It's free to list and buy your items on sandbox, take advantage of it!

You're ready to go!

Alphabet Soup = #custserv = $: Creating a CRM with IPN

Presented by Star Developer Award winner Chuck Hudson of Aduci (http://www.aduci.com/) in the Tech Playground supporting the concurrent #xinnovate hackathon.

IPN = PayPal Instant Payment Notification
CRM = Customer Relationship Management

Focus for this session: Transaction type = cart

Tip: Remove data order considerations from your parsing because different cart IPNs may have different ordering.

Using IPN to create a CRM is a simple and elegant as using IPN fields like txn_id, txn_type, payer_id, payment_status to segment on customer data and type of notice.

Start grouping and parsing customer data to see order trends and identify repeat customers. This is the start of a valuable CRM system.

IPN timestamps are returned in Pacific time. Recommend converting to UNIX time for easier manipulation.

Sometimes you can miss an IPN, so it's a good idea to do regularly reconcile individual IPNs with a history report. IPNs have unique transation IDs you can use to resolve duplicates.

Also watch out for special characters. Best practice: stip or substitute special characters before you start processing.

On http://developer.paypal.com, use the IPN generator tool to generate IPNs for testing and debugging.

Find code samples from the session here:
https://www.x.com/docs/doc-1523 (login required)

Show me the money! Sellers powered by data...

Terapeak's Fred Speckeen, in his session on Business Intelligence and Merchant Reporting, talked about the importance of solid business intelligence for the e-commerce space.

e-Commerce is a data-driven business environment; extracting information from the vast amounts of collected data is important for the success of merchants. However, this offers several interesting challenges -

• Extracting and unlocking the value in the voluminous data.
• Providing the right insights at the right time
• Bundling insights into an app that is easy to use

Fast and straightforward data reporting enables merchants to be more competitive and respond to market  changes with certainty.

Fred demo'ed Terapeak's BI app integrated within PayPal to show how to leverage analytics to save merchants time and money.

Sellers, take control of your data and make smarter selling decisions!

PayPal Innovate 2010: Sandbox Web checkout APIs

Amish Patel presented a very useful session on Sandbox testing.  He covered setting up test accounts, accessing the APIs, testing emails and IPNs.

Here are the highlights of his session:

Key url to access PayPal sandbox:
https://Developer.paypal.com

Steps to access your PayPal sandbox account:
1.  login to the developer account first before accessing the actual sandbox accounts.  If you don't have one, then you must first create a developer account
2.  Create as many sandbox test accounts as you need using the preconfigured account tool

Payment Review:
Enables you to do risk modelling.  This puts your transactions in review and helps you test out various scenarios.

Negative test mode:
Returns the specific error that you set in every API call. 

Test emails:
sandbox emails are retained within the account and not actually sent out.  In the sandbox they are text only.  It has only one page worth of emails. 

Accessing APIs:
1.  Login into the sandbox test account
2.  Go to Profile -> Account Information -> API Access
3.  Click on Request API Credentials

IPNs:
You can simulate IPNs using the test tools link.   You can set up your URL where you have your IPN listener.

Best practices:
1.  Create transactions between accounts in one developer account.  Helps reconcile information and avoid confusion.
2.  Use the preconfigured accounts.  It is automatically set up with Bank Account, Credit Card & Balance.  The only reason you would want to use a manual account is when the country you want to create an account in, is not in the drop down for preconfigured account.
3.  If you see errors or run into problems report it to Merchant Technical Support

You will be able to find the presentation on www.x.com shortly.

How to Select the Best PayPal Product to Pay and Get Paid

Did you ever wonder which one of PayPal's products is right for you?

This session overviews the different assortment of PayPal products that you can utilize to create your application and how to make money using them.

What was covered in today's session.

Accepting Payments by credit card.

Accepting Payments by PayPal.

Accepting Payments by mobile.

How to accept Payments for others.

The bottom line is, using PayPal as a payment type for your site results in much greater conversion rates.

Eagerly waiting for PayPal Innovate 2010 to start

I am with PayPal X Platform team working on B2B commercial payments. B2B payment space is an exciting new frontier for PayPal and I am working with eBay/PayPal’s suppliers to introduce them to the benefits of accepting PayPal as a new payment method.  PayPal payments are processed in real time, offer greater transaction visibility and provide detailed remittance report. In working with external suppliers, I onboard them onto this pilot program, respond to their various enquiries, collect feedback from them, and collate the information for internal analysis and work with internal stakeholders to help design better internal processes.

Outside of PayPal, I spend every moment with my two lovely daughters and husband. Cooking is my passion and I love to try different cuisines from different parts of the world.

I am really excited to attend PayPal X Innovate 2010. It’s right around the corner on Oct 26 and 27 at the Moscone West, San Francisco. I am looking forward to meeting the developers and learn from them how they are utilizing the platform products and services. Come join me, you can’t miss this: https://www.paypal-xinnovate.com/about.html. See you soon...

I am going to PayPal X Innovate 2010

I manage the developer technical support that works with developers who use the eBay APIs.  We help with API questions, show how to consume the APIs with code samples, triage and troubleshoot issues, recommend best practices and give you tips and tricks that can speed up your eBay application development.

In my spare time I enjoy doing nature trails and light hiking.  My favorite trail is Rancho San Antonio.

Sarika and I are presenting the session on eBay API fundamentals at Innovate.  Come check out the session at 4:00 pm on Tuesday, which will help you get a jumpstart in developing your application on the largest ecommerce platform.

I am looking forward to two action-packed days at Innovate and learning about the new PayPal products and features. 

What I'm looking forward to at PayPal X

Howdy! I'm a DTS engineer at eBay's Developer's Program. That's right, I'm the guy that you talk to when something's gone wrong and you have a bug to file. I gave the speech for the Beginner's Tips and Tricks session at this year's eBay Developers Conference.

I'm looking forward to the Giants taking the world series this year! Go Giants!

What am I looking forward to at PayPal X? I'm really looking forward to meeting all of our developers and seeing cool things that they are coming out with. I'm also looking forward to attending the eBay API Fundamentals session!