E-Commerce Express : paypal

Putler Serves Up Better PayPal Data

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:38:00 GMT

Internet retailers/ecommerce merchants using Paypal are forced to log into the service whenever they need critical data – and that’s inconvenient. Desktop application Putler however enables sellers to download, analyze, search through and act upon transactions without logging into the payment service each and every time – and that’s convenient.

Paypal merchants have access to trend charts (Sales vs customers, top products, and some interesting insights on customer acquisition and trends), analysis on key performance indicators (KPI’s) for sales and products, transaction lists, targets/forecasts, refund tools and much more.

The application is sold at three levels (Plus, Premium and Max) and sells for between $9-29/mo. The higher the level, the more accounts can be added and more transactions reported. Only Premium and Max level users can access dashboards related to products, customers and comparisons.

A Bundle of eBay Announcements

Website Magazine : ecommerce — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:30:00 GMT

New announcements from eBay about ecommerce, Facebook and PayPal have been filtering through the news over the last couple of days, so let’s take a look at some of these new and interesting developments: X.commerce X.commerce is an open commerce...(read more)

Cashie Launches Leveraging PayPal X

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 18:44:00 GMT

Ecommerce solution provider WebAssist released a new hosted, cloud-based service today called Cashie which allows for website owners of any expertise level to add a "professional-grade" shopping cart to their website or blog with a few lines of code. While not neccessarily the most innovative of products, what makes Cashie noteworthy is that it is built upon the relatively new PayPal X Developer Platform.

Hieu Bui, co-founder and president of WebAssist, said, “Cashie lowers the barriers so that anyone can start monetizing their website or blog. You no longer need to be a developer or coder to get rich, robust features. Cashie does all the hard work on the back-end so website owners can focus on their business and selling."

Mr. Bui is certainly right about lowering the barriers (at least the technical ones) and Cashie could be positioned to gain some momentum, but as it stands today the system has a few rather significant problems - namely cost.

Each Cashie account can be connected to only one Checkout process, making management of multiple checkouts a real challenge - but there is actually a deeper problem. While you can connect multiple Cashie accounts to the same PayPal Website Payments Pro account, this service costs 30$ per month and is seperate from PayPal's transaction fees of betwen 2.2% and 2.9% (as we understand it) and cashie's 1% transaction fee.

Naveed Anwar, PayPal's senior director of the PayPal Developer Network, remarks, “We're pleased that a partner like WebAssist has chosen to build their new service using PayPal X. Cashie is another great example of innovative products and services that can be built on the PayPal platform. We're looking forward to seeing how website owners monetize their content using PayPal and Cashie.”

While Cashie is definitely an elegant looking solution, and while there is a great deal of potential in PayPal X, the solution is better suited to mid-tier merchants.