The Home of Ben May, Hervey Bay, QLD, Australia. Personal Blog of Ben May, Hervey bay

After Lunch on Tuesday, I was in the car and headed on down to Brisbane, in anticipation of the PayPal Developer Seminar, hosted at the Emporium Hotel, Brisbane.

The morning kicked off with registration at 8am, and the talks started off at 8:30.

Glenn Lim (Global Head of Alliance Marketing) spoke about growing your business and learning about the PayPal Developer Program.

Adam Mawdesley (Country Product Manager) explained payment processing, avoiding online payment risks, explaining and differentiating non-eBay products that PayPal offers.

After morning tea, Spiro Rokos (Senior Manager and Sales Engineering) reviewed PayPal products and technologies, in more depth, how the PayPal API can work to your advantage, and compared to the WPS (Website Payments Standard) and Express Checkout.

Spiro also spoke about PayPal’s new product, “Recurring Payments” rather than the old Subscription payment system, along with different authentication types. This was very interesting and I learnt some payment authorisation types that I never knew existed.

By lunch time, I was back on the road, heading back to Hervey Bay.

Some interesting facts that I learnt from the day include;

• PayPal has over 5 million accounts in Australia and over 184 Million accounts world wide. Compared to 200 Million credit cards, and PayPal is only 10 years old, vs 57 years.
• PayPal is no longer JUST for eBay, companies like DealsDirect, BigW, Dick Smith are all using PayPal for the online payments.
• PayPal is a registered Australian Financial institution, just like any bank, and has on average, US$3 Billion each fortnight stored within accounts.
• Currently, there are only FOUR certified PayPal developers in Australia, this will soon change!
• PayPal looks after all your PCI Compliance, and saves you a lot of time and money.

There was plenty to take in, plenty of tips and tricks to take down.

When Speaking to Adam at morning tea, he said that there had been around 60 – 70 participants in Sydney along with Brisbane, however Melbourne has had almost double the amount of RSVP’s.

Thanks To PayPal Australia for the morning, it was good to put a face to a somewhat faceless company, and to see that they are now trying to actively market themselves to PayPal developers and web developers.

Also thanks for the PayPal Laptop Sleeve – very nice.