With roughly 72 million active accounts worldwide, PayPal has become the de facto payment standard for person-to-person Internet transactions. But it's not only individuals who are taking advantage of the service. E-commerce sites around the globe rely on PayPal payment processing as well.

Last week in San Jose, PayPal and its parent, eBay, hosted its annual Developers Conference to highlight new technologies and services users have access to now and will see in the coming year. Dave Nielson, Manager of PayPal Developer's Network, sat down with ECommerce Guide to talk about some of the concerns small business owners have and what PayPal is doing to address those issues.

During a keynote speech on Tuesday, June 21, Nielson said feedback his company has received indicated merchants wanted four things: stop requiring users to sign up for a PayPal account when paying for an item, give merchants more control over the checkout process, only send PayPal users to the PayPal site when paying for an item and give merchants the ability to charge customers only when an item ships.

With the announcement on June 17 of the new Express Checkout and Website Payments Pro services, most of those features were delivered.

"For the sole proprietor, our standard product meets their needs," Nielson told ECommerce Guide. "But certainly, we've now given them more flexibility. It's going to remain a very important part of our offering. However, SMBs tend to need to customize payment flow more than our standard product. We can now give them this flexibility and control of the payment process."

Nielson added that, at the same time, PayPal new offerings still leave plenty of opportunity for developers to step up and create customized solutions for e-commerce sites.

"Like eBay has developers and a community on its platform, we expect to do the same. For example, our basic product can't calculate restricted sales taxes based on a buyer's zip code," he said.

Another area that Nielson pointed out that has taken off due to developers and merchants working together is the ability to use PayPal payments for digital downloads using a new backend notification method (Payment Data Transfer or PDT).

"The notification service is available to everyone, not just using the Pro service. It's a good example of what people have been asking for," he added.

Nielson said he expects PayPal solutions developer network to continue to grow as more e-commerce merchants sign on and ask for new features. He said the network of consultants already available to merchants can further help integrate any number of commerce solutions.

More information: https://solutions.paypal.com.

Tomorrow: A conversation with Greg Isaacs, Director of eBay Developers Program.

Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.com