Sell Anything On Your Site with the Paypal Storefront Widget

The recently launched Paypal Storefront Widget allows any online sellers (from one-man craft shops to independent record labels) to use the secure payment transaction service by embedding the widget on their site. While the widget isn’t completely customizable - you’re stuck with a set size and it only supports transactions in US dollars, the platform makes e-commerce transactions easier for both buyers and sellers. The widget includes a picture index of the items for sale through the widget, product pages giving customers a larger view of the selected items,  an in-widget shopping cart, and a  page that explains the store’s policy and conditions (also within the widget). Sellers can also notify their customers’ if their store is closed or when items are sold out.
According to TechCrunch, Paypal hopes the service will be used by social networking sites and blogs, not just online retailers:

Paypal has a deal with SixApart that sees the widget being embeddable into TypePad blogs without the need to copy and paste, for everyone else though its no more difficult than any widget is to embed, presuming you know where to get at, and where to paste the html…

Paypal sees a lot of possibilities for the widget; for example it provides a seamless shopfront for bands on MySpace who may want to sell recordings. It may also be a substitute for donation buttons that are occasionally used by bloggers as well; Paypal admits that some of their previous embeddable shopping options haven’t been as user friendly as they’d hoped, where as the Storefront widget is focused on being simple to use for everyone.

[via TechCrunch]