How to quickly integrate with multiple merchants from one app

Question

Hi folks,

I'm trying to write a free mobile app that would make payments merchant-agnostic for the customer.

Context: Most web-apps are merchant centric and allow for multiple payment types from the customer. But the problem I'm trying to additionally solve is to have, say, a mobile app that is capable of paying as many merchants as possible using your debit, credit or PayPal account. It shouldn't rely on per-merchant technical partnerships to work. It should just be able to talk to any merchant after writing the upfront code.

There are a few solutions that come to mind: Integrate with VISA, Mastercard, or PayPal. However, my goal is to integrate with stores that sometimes only take debit, sometimes only VISA, sometimes only PayPal, etc, while re-inventing the wheel as little as possible. I'm wondering if anybody has already solved a problem like this before?

1. Which APIs are the easiest to integrate against? Could you name a few?
2. Are there well known merchant-aggregating APIs that are already very popular? Do they cover much larger merchants like Costco and Walmart?
3. Are there partnership costs (with say VISA) I need to be aware of?
4. Is there one API to rule them all that would aggregate even across Debit, VISA, PayPal, etc to reduce things to one integration point?

I need this for a free consumer Android app and would really appreciate any help I can get - especially if it's cost-effective.

Best! Amin

Answer 1

You might be able to obtain a large quantity of Paypal account info on companies who publish their account info for payment, but doing it with credit cards directly would be rather challenging as you would need the company's merchant account information and provider's information in order to process. This info is sensitive data as releasing this info would also allow you to refund yourself money using their merchant account.

Have you thought about using electronic check as a pay option instead? If so, that would allow your app to pay thousands of companies from your application without the complications of getting merchant account info. Let me know if that might be a viable solution for you and I can give you a hand with it.