"Introduction to PayPal and eBay" by Dipen (Part 4)

PayPal to QuickBooks Link
           Big Red Consulting has developed a tool that allows you to import your PayPal transactions into QuickBooks. If you use QuickBooks to manage your business, this product will generate a QuickBooks-compatible Interchange File Format (IIF) file from a comma-separated values (CVS) file of your PayPal account history that you can download from the PayPal website. The IIF file this product generates is much more robust than the IIF file you can have PayPal generate for you. For more information, visit http://bigredconsulting.com/products/

Developer Resources
        This article goes into a good level of detail on the options available to PayPal developers. Additionally, there are a number of online resources, described in the following sections, where you can get specific PayPal information, the latest versions of SDK downloads, recent news and announcements, and technical support for helping find an answer to a particular question.

Developer Central
          Developer Central is the portal from which you can access all PayPal developer resources. It’s the starting point for developers on the PayPal website. You can create an account on Developer Central if you want to use the PayPal Sandbox to test out your applications. I definitely recommend checking into Developer Central and creating an account today. For more information, visit https://developer.paypal.com.

Integration Center
           PayPal’s Integration Center contains technical documentation, reference materials, and resources that you should consult when looking online for information. The Integration Center’s knowledge base contains answers to several hundred common questions and offers a useful search function. The site provides overviews of PayPal’s different technologies, downloads for the various PayPal SDKs, and the latest versions of all PayPal PDF documentation. And if you have a question that you just can’t find the answer to, you can file a ticket on the Integration Center that will be answered by one of PayPal’s Merchant Technical Support staff. For more information, visit https://www.x.com/.

PayPal Developer Community
        The PayPal Developer Community is a hub of activity that is visited by hundreds of developers every day. The discussion forums are an extremely popular destination where developers communicate with fellow developers about common interests and questions. The site is regularly visited by PayPal experts who can help you find answers to your questions. Additionally, this site contains the PayPal Developer Blog, where I or other PayPal folks post news, announcements, events, and some other random thoughts. Status on the PayPal live and testing systems is also available on the community homepage, so if you start receiving errors all of a sudden, you can check this page to see if a temporary site outage
has occurred. For more information, visit http://paypal.lithium.com.

Solutions Directory
        The Solutions Directory lists third-party products and services that work with PayPal. Primary among the listings are the numerous shopping cart services available that are pre-integrated with PayPal payments. For many merchants, simply choosing a shopping cart that already works with PayPal is easier than hiring a developer to build a custom solution. Additionally, there are several other categories where you may find a solution that can help you meet your business needs. These include digital goods delivery, IPN tools, affiliate program services, and membership systems.

PayPalTech
          PayPalTech contains useful example code and scripts that can generate code that is customized for your website. This is a good site to find solutions to common tasks such as finding Perl code to make an API call or writing a basic IPN script. The site is maintained by PayPal employees.

PayPalDev.org
            Before the PayPal Developer Community was launched, this site was the main place to go to get community support for PayPal issues. These forums have been up for a long time and have archived information on just about any PayPal topic you can think of. Many PayPalDev.org members have been contributing and supporting developers for many years.

Summary
          As mentioned previously, PayPal has grown faster than almost any other business in history and continues to expand at a breakneck pace. With a vision to become the global standard in online payments, PayPal is taking on the dirty work of integrating its service with local banking establishments, currencies, and standards from countries around the world. It’s clear that millions of buyers prefer the simplicity and security that PayPal offers. While eBay remains very important to the continued growth of PayPal, it’s from eBay where a great deal of exciting progress is being made. That’s also the segment of PayPal’s business that this article addresses. PayPal does much more than just process payments. Improvements in areas such as reporting, fraud prevention tools, seller protection policies, dispute resolution processes,
and API functionality continue to push the envelope in terms of offering a complete, endto- end digital money platform. Once you get beyond the basics, though, things can get confusing in a hurry. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, there is likely more than one way to approach the solution. This article will help you make sense of the various options and enable you make solid decisions when designing your website or application. PayPal has the potential to both shake up and galvanize the commerce industry and enable new possibilities for global payments. The ability to send money to anyone or buy something from someone anywhere on the planet at any time is a powerful concept. We’re
still a few years away from being there, but the infrastructure is being put in place to allow for this level of scalability. The next article is where we start digging into the details. We’ll start by taking a look at
the heart of the PayPal system: the PayPal account.