PayPal is opening its platform to third-party developers and allowing developers to embed PayPal's global payment system into their applications and platforms. Scott Thompson, President of PayPal, said payment for services is a bigger opportunity than ecommerce is today at more than 30 trillion dollars. "Your business will become our business - we view you as our third set of customers."
Thompson was speaking at the PayPal Platform Preview event on Thursday where the company demonstrated some of the early applications developed using the PayPal open platform API. One application called TwitPay allowed PayPal members to send money to other individuals via Twitter.
PayPal is now opening up the beta trial of its open platform to 300 developers, and will kick off the public beta during its first dedicated developers conference on November 3, 2009, in San Francisco. The session tracks, described here, include Innovators and Emerging Payments; Web Checkout with PayPal; Mobility; Financial Innovations; and E-commerce with eBay.
PayPal also kicked off a campaign on Thursday called Change How We Pay to solicit ideas, with a video that shows PayPal's vision of how easy it will be to use its service to pay for offline purchases in the future.
Last year, eBay opened its platform to developers for selling applications, launching a pilot program called Project Echo. In April 2009, eBay demonstrated Selling Manager Applications and revealed the business model: it would take a 20 percent share of the fees developers charged sellers for using their applications. In return, developers would gain exposure to eBay sellers who use Selling Manager through listings in the App Catalog.
PayPal is opening its platform to third-party developers and allowing developers to embed PayPal's global payment system into their applications and platforms. Scott Thompson, President of PayPal, said payment for services is a bigger opportunity than ecommerce is today at more than 30 trillion dollars. "Your business will become our business - we view you as our third set of customers." 
