PayPal has received a lot of criticism. (On this, see my article "Assessing Criticism of PayPal,"Web Commerce Today, 3/15/02. http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct5/paypal_assess.htm ) But PayPal has forged on, adding banking interfaces with most European countries and elsewhere, and now offers merchants the ability to accept payment in a variety of currencies. With their acquisition by eBay, PayPal is here to stay and needs to be understood and used by more online merchants.
PayPal provides merchants a way to receive credit card payments as a lower-cost alternative to merchant credit card accounts and payment gateways. Merchants like PayPal's successes at combating fraud and building a secure, safe marketplace using buyer and seller validation and histories. Some customers actually prefer to pay via PayPal. It has come a long way since its first appearance as a payment alternative for eBay shoppers.
Most small business shopping carts now allow PayPal as a payment option and a few offer PayPal's new Instant Payment Notification (IPN) system that corresponds to real-time credit card authorization. This issue explores some ways merchants are now using PayPal's tools to sell both hard and soft goods in online stores. I hope you find it useful.
Until now, PayPal has lacked an automatic way of notifying e-commerce applications that a shopper has completed a purchase. Instead it has relied on e-mail notification. Recently PayPal has implemented a new Instant Payment Notification (IPN) system that sends full payment information to the merchant's server in a manner similar to real-time credit card authorization. This article introduces you to the system and looks a some of its strengths and current weaknesses. Read the Article
Shopping Cart Implementation of PayPal
Most small business shopping cart applications now offer PayPal as a payment method. This article lists which popular e-commerce applications offer PayPal, and which include PayPal's new Instant Payment Notification (IPN) interface. In addition, you'll find specialized e-commerce software that supports PayPal IPN and code that implements PayPal IPN in a variety of programming environments -- Perl, ColdFusion, ASP/VBscript, PHP, and Java/JSP. Read the Article
New Ecommerce and Web Marketing Articles
Each month our team of link editors scours dozens of online periodicals and resources to find
key information on e-commerce and Web marketing. With so much new literature
available to you, how do you find what you need quickly and painlessly? Here's a selective and searchable database of article and resource links to help your
research and keep you up-to-date in the field. (Links gathered in a given month are usually available during the second week of the following
month.)
PayPal has received a lot of criticism. (On this, see my article 
