A new PayPal API

[tmsdev]

PayPal is opening up a new API in November and throwing a whole conference dedicated to it. For some reason, they decided to waste one sweet domain name on a lame blog dedicated to the subject. Cannot help but wonder, though, how much innovation and "geeking out" one can get out of a brain-dead simple payment API?

[tmsdev]

So anyways, long story short, here is what's new there:

• They lowered the fees for PP and bank-backed transactions
• Now can do parallel payments - to multiple recipients at once
• Can do chained payments - when a transfer goes from one recipient to another, and everyone takes a commission - geared for affiliate programs
• Preapprovals - a user can authorize a vendor to keep charging up to a certain amount ($2k max) without repeat logins at the PP site every time - good for games, Skype, other micropayments

The API is available in Java and PHP, and really just some code to create SOAP requests. Although how much of that is really new, I don't know -- e.g., Skype micropayment stuff has been around for some time now...