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Archive for July, 2009
PayPal Announces Adaptive Payments: Parallel Payments and Chained Payments Functionality via API
As most of you no doubt already know PayPal recently announced plans to open up its payment backbone to third party developers. The new platform is called Adaptive Payments and is slated to launch in November at PayPal’s Innovate 2009 Conference. This an exciting move and one that will surely help PayPal continue its rise in the payments industry.
What is most interesting about the Adaptive Payments platform is its ability to handle parallel payments and chained payments.
Parallel payments allow a single payment by a sender to be split amongst any number of receivers. This comes in handy when a buyer purchases items from different sellers. With parallel payments the buyer can set up one transaction and the monies will be distributed to all of the sellers that the buyer bought from.
Chained payments allow the sender to send one payment to a specific merchant who can then keep their share and payout the balance to various members of their supply chain. The example Tech Crunch gives for chained payments is that of a travel agent. In this case the buyer would simply send payment to the travel agent and the travel agent could then keep their commission and send the rest of the cash to the hotel, airline and car rental businesses that the customer really bought from.
These types of payment methods aren’t groundbreaking. However, what is groundbreaking is the ability to plug into PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API and add these to any site quickly and easily. Prior to Adaptive Payments parallel and chained payments functionality would have had to be built by hand in house leading to much longer product development cycles.
You can find more on PayPal’s Adaptive Payments platform at Tech Crunch and Payments Views:
- “PayPal Adaptive Payments”: Payments Views
- “Paypal Looks to Crush Amazon’s Fledgling Payment Service With A New, Secret API”: Tech Crunch
We’ll continue to watch the development of Adaptive Payments right here as well so please subscribe to make sure you get the latest.
Last Friday, Authorize.net had an outage for several hours due to a fire in a Seattle data center (coverage on TechCrunch), leaving many companies without the ability to accept credit cards. In addition to the many ecommerce and software as a service companies that were impacted, many POS systems connect to Auth.net to process card-present transactions.
While Authorize.net has had several high-profile outages through its history, the overall reliability rate is pretty high. Even so, prudent businesspeople should consider having a backup gateway setup in case of an Auth.net outage.
While there are some gateways that are processor-specific (for example Braintree), there are many that are not processor-specific, for example eProcessingNetwork and USAePay, that, like Authorize.net, can be used with most processors. The cost of such gateways, with no transactions being processed, ranges between $10-$20 / month. When you process a transaction with your alternate gateway, it will be transmitted in exactly the same way to your credit card processor and your billing and deposit will happen as if Auth.net had never gone down in the first place.
It is not very difficult to integrate an additional payment gateway into your software, in fact, most ecommerce packages and payment processing libraries have support for multiple gateways built in. Some competing gateways, for example eProcessingNetwork, have auth.net emulation which allows even easier integration.
In short, if the latest Auth.net outage cost you more than $120-240, you should consider having a hot backup online and ready to go in case of another outage.
