We’re excited to announce that PayPal ID’s are now part of the Gigya platform for social login.  Dave Yovanno, Gigya’s CEO, and Brian Schmidt, a Gigya developer partner, demo’d the integration on stage at PayPalX Innovate this afternoon.

According to PayPal, password fatigue and identity fraud is a major issue

• The average person has 25 online accounts and 6.5 passwords
• 66% of people use 1-2 passwords across all sites
• The average user logs in 8 times each day

Businesses are affected as well.  Forgotten passwords are the #1 source of online customer service issues, and customer service is one of the largest costs for online businesses, so reducing the number of inquiries here will have a real impact on the bottom line.

How does PayPal view it’s impact as a provider? Four key areas of differentiation:

• Comprehensive fraud system – better authentication of users for businesses – right user, machine, merchant
• Qualified data – name / shipping address / billing address – better service for merchants
• Integration with payment – most streamlined payment process for users without sacrificing security
• Level of assurance

Adding PayPal to your social sign-in options on the Gigya platform enables it as a login button just like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and the other social identity providers. You can see what it looks like here:

PayPal is also supported in Gigya’s mobile SDKs for iPhone/iPad and Android:

PayPal is in a limited rollout early release with the service and currently requires that any application apply directly for whitelisting.  PayPal lists the following steps to get your Relying Party (RP) application approved to use the PayPal OpenID Provider (OP) Service:

1. Ensure you have a verified Premier PayPal account.
2. Get API credentials for your PayPal account.
3. Register at X.com with your PayPal account.
4. Submit your RP application for approval.

Visit the PayPal Identity site for the full instructions.

Once your app is whitelisted, simply add “paypal” to the list of enabled providers in your showLoginUI code to present PayPal as a login option on your site or app.

If your code uses ‘enabledProviders’ (either in your conf object or params object) you will need to add paypal to the list along with the other providers.  For example, if ‘enabledProviders’ already contained “facebook,twitter”, the list would be modified to include paypal as well:

gigya.services.socialize.showLoginUI(conf, {
enabledProviders: “paypal,facebook,twitter”
});

If your code does not use ‘enabledProviders’ (either in your conf object or params object) you will need to add it, listing paypal along with a ‘*’ (wildcard) to indicate the list of all other providers.  For example, the most basic form of showLoginUI would be as follows:

gigya.services.socialize.showLoginUI(conf, {
enabledProviders: “paypal,*”
});

Tags: Gigya, Paypal, Social Login

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