nathanfish.com

Paypal offer a great many solutions for e-commerce and payments. Paypal Pro offers on site credit card processing, integration with your own merchant account at a very reasonable price. It does require you to offer Paypal Express as an option, which is fine, though a little silly when you consider your paying for the service and having to also promote Paypal seems ingenious. Paypal Standard is a great introductory commerce solution, simple to use, and works for a lot of small businesses online.

The newest Paypal offering “Adaptive Payments” is a competitve response to Amazon’s Payment Services. It offers some features that are ideal for the entrepreneur building an online business. The concept of parallel and chained recipients. A single consumer payment can be split between recipients. It even offers options that allow the consumer  to see who is receiving the payment split or showing just the primary recipient and hiding the additional chained payments. Chained payments make it possible to pay referral fees, service or transaction fees to third parties through Paypal as part of a single payment.

The challenge is that Adaptive Payments is missing the customization and other features available through Paypal Pro or Standard. It doesn’t support multiple “items” within the payment, it doesn’t support item name/quantity or other item descriptors. You are limited to stating who the payment is too “My Web Shop” and a simple memo “thanks for the purchase or X”. It seems it was designed for the professional services business and not e-commerce. Adaptive Payments is new, hopefully they continue to evolve it. I could certainly see a lot of hosted commerce solutions leveraging Adaptive Payments.

Categorized as Uncategorized