14 DAY TRIAL // EBay's financial results for the second quarter came in yesterday and, while overall they weren't too encouraging, with the Internet giant seeing a 29 percent drop in net income, the highlight of the report was the solid growth its Payments division, made up of PayPal and Bill Me Later, had posted. So it's no surprise then that the company is investing even more in this sector, with eBay announcing a new flexible payment platform for PayPal called Adaptive Payments.
"Until now, developer innovation has been stifled by the barriers payment systems impose," said Scott Thompson, president of PayPal. "With an open platform, we're solving fundamental challenges people face when trying to pay or get paid and giving people the tools to create new business models for their innovations."
The API is designed to provide developers with a much more open access to the system and also allowing them more freedom in the transactions. The emphasis is on connectivity and global reach but, perhaps more importantly, also on security, as giving developers more leeway in using the platform could potentially increase the possibility of abuse. Rumors about the upcoming platform were actually reported a couple of weeks ago and later confirmed by eBay, at the time many were wondering how much of a contribution Amazon's own Flexible Payments Service (FPS), which offered similar functionality, made on the decision to build the new APIs.
Adaptive Payments is actually very similar to FPS, allowing several advanced payment options like the possibility to have multiple receivers, with each getting a cut of the payment, and even the possibility to become a payment aggregator, which is currently against PayPal's ToS. Amazon's FPS, though, has both of the features and also has a micropayments system put in place something the new Adaptive Payments API is also boasting. The new API tools are part of a broader push by eBay called PayPal X and will be released sometime in November.