It looks like PayPal is rolling out a more flexible payments API called Adaptive Payments. We’ve obtained a confidential document, which is embedded below, explaining the details of the new system. Basically the API is designed to give developers full access to PayPal’s features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications which include the ability to accept and distribute payments.
Very similar to Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service (FPS), the Adaptive Payments API handles payments between a sender of a payment and one or more receivers of the payment. Adaptive Payments allows almost the same functionality as FPS. The new API lets developers become a payment aggregator, which we are told is something against PayPal’s current Terms of Service. Amazon’s FPS also lets developers aggregate payments. Moreover, Paypal’s Adaptive Payments has built in micropayments support, another feature of FPS.
