PayPal to launch local Au Certified Developer and Partner programme
PayPal will roll out an Australian version of its ‘Certified Developer and Partner’ programme in July this year.
The news was announced in Sydney last week during the visit down-under of PayPal’s global head of alliances and vertical markets, Glenn Lim.
According to the announcement, the programme will “recruit local developers and solution providers to help meet the growing demand for online payments outside of the retail sector.”
Details are scarce so far but it appears the local partner programme will be similar to the US partner programme.
Four Australians are listed as certified partners on the US PayPal partner portal including Melbourne based Russell Lewis.
Lewis told eCommerce Report that he was initially certified as a PayPal developer some years ago.
He said the certification involved doing an online exam, which took about an hour and a half.
However PayPal has since taken over out the Verisign payment gateway business, and today offers a range of higher-end gateway products, branded Payflow.
These are much more sophisticated than the standard PayPal website express checkout, and Russell said that about two months ago he was asked to update his certification by sitting a new exam.
This time the exam took about a half a day to complete and cost about $US300-400.
He said it was much more complex than the initial certification exam, and not just because it also covered the old Verisign product range.
“PayPal has substantially changed a lot of its Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) in recent years” said Russell.
A spokeswoman for PayPal said that Australia will be the first country outside of the US to get a local developer programme. She said it was likely to feature a local partner portal, and that it would not affect the certifications of the company’s existing local developer partners.
PayPal claims to be used by as many of 30 of the top 50 local online retailers, and is now planning to extend its market footprint into new sectors, and particularly non-profit organisations.
It said the Koala Hospital is using PayPal to raise funds online for its Adopt a Koala programme.
North Sydney Council too, has recently integrated PayPal into its website, enabling both property owner and residents to pay their rates with PayPal.
For more information go to
www.paypal.com/au
www.paypal.com/certifieddeveloper
www.rusware.com
www.koalahospital.org.au
www.northsydney.nsw.gov.au
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