PayPal Web Services, currently in beta release, is comprised of four new informational and transactional APIs enabling developers and merchants of all sizes to create ecommerce solutions and applications that integrate with the PayPal platform. This new offering expands PayPal's existing family of Website Payments functionality and reporting features, and includes PayPal's popular Instant Payment Notification (IPN) service.

In its initial release, the PayPal Web Services beta provides access to the following four API calls:
TransactionSearch: Based on specified search criteria such as payment date or customer name, returns a set of matching transaction IDs and basic transaction details.
GetTransactionDetails: For a given transaction, returns all details associated with the transaction, such as customer email address, time of payment, and purchase details.
RefundTransaction: For a given transaction, reverses the transaction and issues a refund or partial refund to the purchaser.
MassPay: Transfers funds to one or many recipients by providing an automated alternative to cutting paper checks or manually initiating individual payments (available end of second quarter, 2004).
PayPal Web Services enables more streamlined and automated access to the PayPal platform, and broadens the audience for PayPal's ecommerce tools to include advanced technical developers and enterprise customers. PayPal Web Services are based on open standards, supporting Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL).

"Through PayPal Web Services, we are able expand the availability of advanced online payment capabilities to a new class of developers, third-party tool vendors and merchants," said Dave McClure, Director of PayPal's Developer Network. "These new standards-based APIs will allow almost anyone to create innovative applications and services incorporating PayPal."

PayPal Web Services Solutions

One of the first companies to incorporate PayPal's SOAP enabled Web Services is Grand Central. A Business Services Network, Grand Central delivers "Integration-On-Demand" to enterprises - lowering the cost, time, and risk of application integration of web services.

"Grand Central provides businesses with a powerful, yet easy, network to publish and consume services on demand," said Ron Palmeri, Executive Vice President, Product & Corporate Development of Grand Central. "By incorporating PayPal Web Services into our Business Services Directory, we can now offer our customers the simplest, fastest and most cost-effective integration to PayPal's powerful ecommerce platform which is used by more than 45 million member accounts around the world."

Developer Central

Developers and merchants can setup and access the PayPal Web Services at the newly launched PayPal Developer Central (https://developer.paypal.com). Designed as an information hub to educate eCommerce developers, Developer Central offers information on how to set up developer certificates, get started with PayPal APIs, and access developer forums for discussion and questions. Developers can also use the new PayPal Sandbox, a testing environment for PayPal Web Services.

The PayPal Web Services architecture shares a common API structure with eBay's web services offerings. Developers can work with both standards-based platforms without additional training.