PayPal Commerce Identity
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
The Innovate 2011 conference (#Innovate2011) is only one day away, and the first big news already hits it: PayPal (sorry, eBay, ... sorry X.Commerce) is most likely launching a so-called Commerce Identity and will reveal its workings during the Innovate-conference. Supposedly, this Commerce Identity will allow you to have a common customer-profile througout the web. So what are the benefits and what are the downsides?
Meet the architectural layer
Ofcourse, we don't have a clue yet what the architecture of this thing called Commerce Identity will be, but there are already good guesses to be made. In the past, eBay acquired PayPal and Magento, and while eBay had already some kind of user-profile on their eBay site, PayPal is integrated into numerous Magento sites. All this put together will form a new platform called X.Commerce. Using the X.Commerce platform (#X_commerce), eBay now has the chance to role out the functionality of customer-profiles to any Magento shop that uses PayPal as payment method. The possibilities are huge.
So what's the benefit?
This commerce-identity can be carried over numerous sites, thanks to an infrastructure of PayPal. Most likely it will require a customer to login through some kind of PayPal authentication-method (which reminds us of the Facebook and Gmail authentication-schemes) to your site, and thanks to this, the site will have access to the customer profile.
Such a customer profile will be focussed on e-commerce, and might contain values like shoe-size, date of birth, gender, and interests. Based on the entered profile-values, a customer will need to enter less details to get the product he/she wants. Also, advertizing is more specific (so perhaps less annoying). For Magento developers, this might also give an enormous boost to built exciting new features.
So what's the downside?
The downside is ofcourse privacy. Any detail you enter in a Magento shop is shared among any other Magento shop, giving way to abuse. Most likely, the values being shared will only concern specific fields like date-of-birth and shoe-size, so not your phone-number and creditcard. But still, this is what scares a lot of people. My advise to those people would be: Don't enter your shoe-size in your PayPal profile, then nothing will be shared.
But wait, Mike, there's more!
But wait, there's more: The Innovate 2011 congres has not even started yet. News about the X.Commerce platform will be unveiled, as well as further details on Magento 2. Stay tuned!