PayPal is to make available a payments API dubbed Adaptive Payments, providing developers with access to PayPal's features as well as to more capabilities to develop applications, including accepting and distributing payments, techcrunch.com reports.

The PayPal Adaptive Payments API resembles Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service (FPS), handling payments between a sender and one or several receivers of the payment. Adaptive Payments is to include simple payments (enabling a sender to send a single payment to one receiver), as well as the so-called 'Chained Payments' and 'Parallel Payments'. The Parallel Payments application enables a sender to send one payment to more receivers, allowing users to create a shopping cart which allows shoppers to pay for the products selected from several merchants with one payment. PayPal would thus take money from the sender's account and deposit it in the receivers' account.

With Chained Payments developers can create applications "that enable a sender to send a single payment to a primary receiver who may keep part of the payment and pay other, secondary receivers with the remainder of the funds. For example, an application might be an online travel agency that handles bookings for airfare, hotel reservations, and car rentals. The sender sees only the travel site as the primary receiver", according to the same source. In this case, PayPal would deduct the money from the sender’s account and deposit it in the travel website’s account as well as in the secondary receivers’ accounts.

The company has not disclosed any API pricing details yet.