VeriFone is opening up its Sail mobile payment service to developers, allowing them to access a set of commerce of tools through a new developer portal. The move follows through on VeriFone’s plans to make Sail an open platform and it shows how developers and merchants will be able to get a lot out of VeriFone’s answer to Square.
With the portal, developers who want to integrate with VeriFone will be able to access three APIs.
- The Sail Merchant enrollment API gives developers the ability to offer customers an easy way to enroll in a merchant account.
- The Sail payment API with mobile SDK enables developers of iOS and Android apps to embed Sail and accept credit card payments.
- Sail’s Data Sync API allows developers to keep track of Sail transactions in their app.
This can be helpful for developers who want to easily add payments, underwriting and settlement into their mobile apps. And it provides another competitor to services like Braintree and Stripe.
But it also opens the opportunity for developers of merchant services to integrate with Sail and offer their services through Sail. Sail is building out a developer showcase in its portal highlighting some of the different integrations that businesses can take advantage of.
Last week, I wrote about Sail’s first integration with inventory specialist Stitch Labs (see disclosure below). Now, Sail is offering more third-party services such as Xero and Outright for accounting, Push Point for marketing and local offers and OWN POS and POS Lavu for front-end point of sale applications.
The idea is build out a showcase for third-party services so business owners can plug in whatever tools they need to augment their mobile payment systems. VeriFone is hoping that will become a selling point for Sail over other mobile payment rivals like Square, which are not open to third-party services.
Disclosure: Stitch Labs is backed by True Ventures, an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
