PayPal X: Get ready for a new PayPal

(July 23, 2009 | Ben Parr, Mashable.com )

(moved from your blog - this is the place)

For a long year, PayPal had no competitor in the online payment industry. However, after Amazon launched its Amazon Payments in 2007, it turned out that it was not just a real competitor, but also a system that turned out to be friendlier and more open to third-party developers — today many applications use Amazon Payments instead of PayPal. And do not forget about Google Checkout , also participating in the competition.
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However, today PayPal has returned to the competition, opening PayPal X and Adaptive Payments, a new initiative that will allow third-party developers to use PayPal in a completely new way. Get ready to share payments, consolidate payments and share PayPal with other sites.


PayPal X Basics

PayPal opens its platform to developers. This leads to the fact that they can now create new products outside of PayPal. This is called PayPal X. The first part of the new initiative is PayPal Adaptive Payments, based on a new API that allows developers to do new things with PayPal.

All information intended for developers will be posted on PayPal-owned one-letter domain X.com (now on the site you can apply for participation in closed beta testing - approx. Translator).

Here are some of the features available now:

• Send money: P2P payments can and will be made on many platforms, and not only on PayPal.com.
• Separate payments: Now you can use the platform to share one payment among several recipients. For example, if you need to pay a sales commission to several partners at once, you can send only one payment instead of four or five.
• Pre-approve payments: Once you log in and confirm pre-payments, the API will automatically send money based on the pre-set details (that is, you can now actually make “payment requests” that will be paid only after the user logs on separate payments or all at once - translator comment).
• Merge payments: To reduce the cost of transfers, users will soon be able to combine multiple payments into one single transaction. Amazon Payments already allows this.

This can be good news for many small firms and third-party developers. As an example, you can look at TwitPay . TwitPay allows users to send and receive micropayments (up to $ 1,000 - approx. Translator) via Twitter . The service works using PayPal, and, in fact, it is one of the first applications using the Adaptive Payments platform (leadership may be the reason why they switched from Amazon Payments). The new API allows you to do operations such as sending payments directly to TwitPay.me (and hopefully it will be possible to split the payments soon).

PayPal Adaptive Payments will not be available to all users and developers until November, however, it is expected that we will see new sites implementing PayPal X technology very, very soon.