(November 9, 2009) In a move that could change the way consumers shop and pay on the Web, a startup called Payvment is marketing a free shopping cart that lets online shoppers accumulate merchandise from a variety of Web sites—including Facebook—and then pay for all of it with a single checkout. “We call it the open shopping-cart network,” says Christian Taylor, Payvment’s chief executive. Besides the single-checkout feature, Taylor says Payvment’s software should reduce shopping-cart abandonment, an age-old problem in e-commerce, by letting consumers keep merchandise in the cart even after they’ve left a site.

Payvment, based in Los Angeles but in the process of moving to San Francisco, is one of the first developers to take advantage of new application programming interfaces from PayPal Inc. PayPal, a unit of eBay Inc., officially unveiled the APIs—and opened its global payments platform to developers—at a conference it held last week in San Francisco (Digital Transactions News, Nov. 3). Payvment is using PayPal’s so-called parallel-payments API, which allows it to keep track of which items came from which merchant and then distribute payments accordingly. Payvment sends a receipt to the shopper and an e-mail to each merchant with shipping or downloading instructions. Merchants must accept PayPal, but Taylor doesn’t see that as a serious limitation, with PayPal now deriving 56% of its processing volume from off-eBay merchants.

Payvment, which Taylor says has been conducting a “private beta” for about a month and officially launched at the end of October, has seen interest run high for its shopping cart. That interest really spiked, Taylor says, when its integration with Facebook became known through press reports last month. With that integration, which went live early last week, merchants can quickly set up a store on the popular social network, which connects 300 million users. “The Facebook integration really blew the doors open,” Taylor says. Inquiries to Payvment from e-commerce developers began to run at 300 to 400 a day, requiring Taylor, the head of a three-person company, to work through the night on some occasions. “It was a little unmanageable,” he says. “But it showed us what the adoption is going to do.”

Merchants showing interest run the gamut in size, Taylor says. “We’re seeing really large companies that signed up for the beta,” he says, though he says he can’t name any. Payvment will shortly release an API that will allow merchants with existing shopping carts to link those carts to the Payvment network, Taylor adds.

Merchants can use Payvment’s shopping cart by copying a single line of code from Payvment’s site into the source code for their sites. That code enables communication not just between the cart and the merchant, but between the cart and all other merchants using it. That means consumers can select goods from any merchant in the network, including those on Facebook, and then leave those sites and check out later with a single transaction. “We want to be the pavement connecting everybody,” Taylor says, referring to the idea that gave birth to the fledgling company’s name.

Payvment has deliberately kept its code simple to encourage adoption. “We used the ‘Mom’ test,” says Taylor. “If you can get your Mom to launch an online store, then we’ve won,”

For now, the code is free, and Payvment is not taking a cut on transactions. That could change later, but Taylor says all who are registering with Payvment now will always have free use. The company, which is in the midst of raising capital after a $250,000 angel round last year, is more concerned with feedback than revenue for the time being, he says.

That feedback could be crucial in letting Payvment know what it got right and what it needs to improve. Shopping carts “haven’t changed much since the Internet flipped its ‘on’ switch,” says Taylor. “But the Internet has changed.”