By Damon Williams
Manager, PayPal Developer Program
www.paypal.com/developer

[Editor's Note: This a 47hats.com Vendor Profile, where I invite someone from a company that I think has something interesting to offer microISVs to make their pitch here. Interested in doing the same? email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com.]

Hello, my name is Damon Williams, and I work at PayPal. I’m our Chief Evangelist, and I also manage the PayPal Developer Program. That means I talk to people all over the world about online payments, and how PayPal can positively impact your bottom line. Bob’s asked me to write a guest post for his blog here at 47hats.com, and I’m always more than happy to talk to a group of entrepreneurs and developers about e-commerce and PayPal.

MicroISVs have a lot of issues to manage. Besides the actual design of your product, you have to figure out how to document, distribute, market, and support it. There are a few features and programs that PayPal has in place to help you out. You may already have a payment solution integrated, and in fact you may already use PayPal, but there are a couple of services popular with the microISV community that I want to make sure everyone is aware of.

Instant Payment Notification

Instant Payment Notification (IPN) has been around for a few years and has become a reliable way for microISVs to sell downloads. Basically, anytime a new payment comes into your PayPal account, PayPal will post a message to a URL that you give us to notify you about the new payment. This allows you to automatically send a registration key or download link to your new customer. There are several pre-integrated digital delivery services based primarily on IPN. A couple that I always recommend are E-Junkie.com and PayLoadz.com. Check them out if you want an out-of-the-box solution for selling downloads. For more information on customizing your own IPN solution, check out https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_ipn.html

Yahoo! PayPal Checkout Program

If you already accept PayPal Express Checkout (https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_expresscheckout.html), or if you are considering adding PayPal Express Checkout, there’s a new program we’ve launched in tandem with Yahoo! that will allow you to get free payment processing from PayPal. Basically the way this works is, if you accept PayPal Express Checkout and also advertise with Yahoo! Search Marketing, you can get $100 in free Yahoo! advertising, plus free PayPal processing for the rest of the year. One guy I turned this program onto is now saving over $5,000 per month! To get more details and to register for this program, visit www.paypal.com/yahoosearch.

I really just touched the tip of the iceberg here. For more information on our developer resources, check out PayPal Developer Central at www.paypal.com/developer. We have a catalog of pre-integrated PayPal products and services listed at www.paypal.com/solutions (Do you have a product to add to our catalog? Let me know). I write the PayPal Developer Blog which you can follow at www.paypaldeveloper.com. And of course I can’s miss an opportunity to mention my new book, Pro PayPal E-Commerce, which covers PayPal A to Z. Top to bottom. Head to toe. You get the picture - it’s got all the goods inside! More on the book, including a sample chapter, is at www.propaypal.com

Thanks for reading, and feel free to post any comments or questions below, and I’ll check back to respond when I can.

-Damon Williams