Cashie Launches Leveraging PayPal X

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.