Paypal X: The Universal Shopping Cart Inches Nearer

One of the unsolved problems in e-commerce is a merchant independent shopping cart. Imagine what happens when customers quickly and comfortably do their Christmas shopping on one shopping platform, but then in the end get bombarded with multiple shipping costs?

Until now there has only been two somewhat practical solutions for this: either you offer free shipping (like Gimahot), or you structure your business like one of the large merchants (such as Otto, Neckermann & Co.).

But now we are getting closer to a much more flexible solution. Paypal will open itself up to 3rd party developers and will offer from November onwards access to its Adaptive Payments solution. Adaptive Payments plans to allow the splitting up of shipping costs across orders from multiple merchants:

"Adaptive Payments will also offer “Parallel Payments,” which would let a sender send a single payment to multiple receivers.

An example of this type of application might be a shopping cart that lets a buyer pay for items from several merchants with one payment.

The shopping cart would allocate the payment to the merchants who actually provided the items. PayPal would then deduct money from the sender’s account and deposits it in the receivers’ accounts."

PayPal has made an announcement, but hasn’t yet given any detailed info on Adaptive Payments. Thankfully, Techcrunch has already publicized some preliminary documentation.

Change the Way We Pay

From the PayPal blog ("Paypal Becomes First Global Payment Platform Open To Third-Party Developers"):

"By releasing new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), PayPal is challenging the developer community to change the way we pay through innovation and new technologies.

Several developers have already integrated PayPal’s new APIs as part of a beta program. Twitpay, a Twitter-based payment service, LiveOps, and Microsoft’s Windows® Azure™ are some of these early partners."

With Paypal X, Paypal might increase their relevance when talking about web-currencies.

Related posts:

• The Shopping System of the Future – Starring: Google, Paypal and Amazon
• 4 Stores, 1 Checkout (2): Gap Raves About New Shopping Cart
• Web Currencies: The Battle For A Universal Currency

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.

Comments

[photo gifts]

looking good for advancing paypal.. hope it doesnt affect current website integration

[personalised gifts]

im intruiged whether this would work with sites like ours that have currency conversion built in and if our own exchange rates can be used when going through to checkout