Friday, July 24, 2009

PayPal Will Be Bigger than eBay, Opens Platform to 3rd Party Developers

PayPal will be bigger than eBay.com, CEO says

by Ina Fried

PASADENA, Calif.--PayPal is just over a third of eBay's revenue at the moment, but the online payment service will ultimately be bigger than the company's flagship e-commerce site, its chief executive said Thursday.

"PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay," CEO John Donahoe said in a talk at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference here. However, he said that shift will take four to six years.

Donahoe's comments came just as the company announced that it is opening up its PayPal platform to third-party developers. "There is this opportunity for an explosion of growth."

Among the uses, Donahoe said we are not that far off from the day where a restaurant beams a bill to your mobile device and you pay via PayPal.

Asked about Facebook's long-rumored payment service, Donahoe noted that online payments require a company to be part financial services outfit and part Internet concern. Those that have been one, but not the other, have failed, he said.

"People will find a much better solution building on top of the PayPal platform," he said.

Donahoe, who has been CEO about 15 months, said the company is a leader that is adjusting to shifts in the market. "We're making the tough changes we need to make," he said. "We need to evolve on an auctions site to an e-commerce site."

Continue Reading

Yesterday they officially announced their open payment platform for third party developers:

PayPal has announced plans "to open itspayment platform to third-party developers with the release of new APIs(Application Programming Interfaces) that allow developers to embedPayPal’s secure global payment system into their applications andplatforms. In opening up the PayPal platform, developers can now createnew ways to send and receive payments for services beyond traditionale-commerce. According to a recent McKinsey report, the global paymentsmarket represents a $30 trillion opportunity."
PayPalhas spent over a decade creating a secure, global payments network fore–commerce and person-to-person transactions, which seamlesslyintegrates 27 financial networks, 15,000 local banks, 190 globalmarkets and supports 19 currencies.

Several developers have integrated PayPal’s new APIs as part ofa beta program. Some of these companies include Twitpay, aTwitter-based payment service; LiveOps, with its new on-demandworkforce service called LiveWork; and Microsoft’s Windows® Azure™platform, a cloud development environment.

PayPal also wants to hear ideas for innovative and interestingways to pay in the future from its community of users. Anyone withideas is invited to submit them to PayPal and the world via Twitterwith the hashtag #changehowwepay and can view responses atwww.changehowwepay.com.

“Until now, developer innovation has been stifled by thebarriers payment systems impose,” said Scott Thompson, President ofPayPal. “With an open platform, we’re solving fundamental challengespeople face when trying to pay or get paid and giving people the toolsto create new business models for their innovations.”

“The Windows Azure platform provides developers with ascalable, interoperable cloud development environment to build anddeploy services and applications,” said Yousef Khalidi, DistinguishedEngineer at Microsoft. “By allowing the developer community to takeadvantage of the PayPal adaptive payment platform through the WindowsAzure platform, developers will have the opportunity to utilize abilling solution for the Windows Azure platform services they offer byproviding customers with an easy on-line payment program option.”

“Using PayPal’s new open platform, we’ve dramatically improvedthe experience of commerce over the social phenomenon, Twitter,” saidMichael Ivey, CEO and co-founder of Twitpay. “The global nature andubiquity of the PayPal service helps us deliver a great service forTwitter users.”

“We were impressed by the seamless integration and theflexibility of PayPal’s payment solution to address LiveWork’steam-based virtual workforce model,” said Eckart Walther, LiveOps SVPand GM of LiveWork. “With LiveWork, different workers can receivedifferent payment amounts based on client specifications. PayPalautomatically calculates and distributes the appropriate amounts toeach worker and service provider. Moreover, PayPal’s established globalpayment solution allows LiveWork clients to easily tap into the globalwork community.”
Additional Information


Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Disqus for ePayment News