X.Commerce announced this week at the Le Web show in Paris that PayPal Access is now available to all Magento Go merchants. This allows customer to shop easily and safely on Magento Go websites with just their PayPal user names and passwords.
The big advantage of PayPal Access is that shoppers don’t have to key in shared information such as their real name, shipping address and email address every time they make a purchase from a new website. They can authorise PayPal to share this data on their behalf. “Smart” profiles present a more stream-lined experience for customers and enable merchants to provide personalized shopping experiences for their visitors. This inspires customer loyalty, which leads to increased sales.
PayPal Access will be installed on Magento Go stores as an extension which means that merchants can enable it in just a few clicks and of course it will then mean that PayPal take a cut of every transaction. That brings me to the point of eBay’s strategy in making X.Commerce an open developer platform… In doing so eBay could win a huge slice of revenue in the form of PayPal fees. Of course that won’t happen all of the time – there’s nothing to stop developers integrating other payment methods.
X.Commerce is intended to join the dots in on-line and off-line commerce and enable not only all of eBay’s properties to be connected but also every developer’s non-eBay property as well. This can include EPOS systems enabling off-line inventory to be easily displayed on-line on websites and marketplaces (such as, but not limited to eBay).
Having a common X.Commerce interface allows credentials to be shared and used across services from multiple developers and will in the future give integrators the ability to more easily build custom solutions to fit their clients needs and merchants the ability to market their products more effectively.
In the first article I wrote about X.Commerce I said that there was nothing much to see yet that’s of interest to merchants. That’s still true but every website owner, eBay seller and off-line retailer out there should be keeping a close eye on developments and talking to their software suppliers and developers to ensure that when solutions are ready that they are amongst the first to take full advantage of the new technology coming down the line.
