Amazon Adding Venmo Payment Support

Amazon announced this week that they will be adding Venmo as a supported payment method in time for the holiday season this year. As a software developer, when a juggernaut like Amazon steps up and does something like this, you should make sure you are familiar with the tech!

Let’s face it- most of us probably already use both Venmo and PayPal- right? I use PayPal for some of my online payments. But I use Venmo for the more person-to-person payments like shooting some funds to my daughters or paying someone back for my share of dinner or a gift. And like many developers, I’ve implemented PayPal integrations multiple times.

I never really paid much attention to Venmo from the developer perspective until just the last year or so. I mean back in 2016 when the Federal Trade Commission was looking into Venmo’s business practices, it didn’t make folks feel too great about the product right?! But now that PayPal owns Venmo, and now that Amazon will be a big online player supporting them in a more business-oriented fashion, it’s time to pay Venmo a bit more attention as a software engineer.

It turns out PayPal has made it pretty darn simple to start interfacing with Venmo in the same ways as we have done technically with PayPal. A quick look at https://developer.paypal.com confirmed this for me. Going here for example (https://developer.paypal.com/docs/checkout/pay-with-venmo/integrate/) it jumps right in to adding a Venmo button to your checkout process. You use the same PayPal account and SDK you’re probably already using!

Here’s an example of the JavaScript code integration and resulting look to the two buttons:

If Amazon is adding Venmo support, we should only assume as software engineers that this could drive higher Venmo usage all around. This is now a great time to brush up on your PayPal and now Venmo integration skills. Check it out at https://developer.paypal.com and look for ways to leverage this and boost your software engineer career.