I want to thank all the people who gave us their suggestions and tested our Beta API Project. The support and testing is much appreciated. I also want to thank the development team for making this a reality.

Official announcement below…

Columbus, Ohio – 2Checkout.com (2CO), a leading payments solutions provider, has added an application programming interface (API) to its robust ecommerce system for online retailers to immediately integrate.

2CO’s back office admin API is a publically accessible set of routines designed to allow existing clients, as well as third parties interested in developing 2CO compatible cart solutions, the ability to access account, product and online sales information without the additional step of logging in to 2Checkout’s administrative area.

According to 2Checkout’s Chief Marketing Officer Chris Daly, “The back office admin API provides an added value for the online retailers utilizing our e-commerce service by enabling them to remotely interact and gather both reconciliation and product level information from their account, without manually logging in to 2CO’s admin area to gather data and manually export it back to their system. This innovation provides a new layer of flexibility for developers interested in creating unique admin systems or utilizing outsourced designs to manage product and settling data daily generated by their 2Checkout activity.”

A primary advantage offered by the back office admin API is the flexibility it provides online retailers and third party cart developers interested in integrating seamless and fully customizable cart solutions into their websites while continuing to benefit from 2Checkout’s suite of built-in services including fraud protection, PCI data storage, multiple payment methods, and 24-hour customer care. Daly added, “Accessing product and sales data through a preferred means on your own system and alleviating the necessity to login to 2CO’s interface multiple times per day greatly adds to our system’s flexibility. And considering our cart volume, providing third party developers the opportunity to easily integrate 2Checkout into popular open-source shopping cart packages makes sense for everyone involved.”

Currently, any active 2Checkout retailer can request access to the API. For more information visit http://www.2checkout.com/documentation/api/ .

Founded in 2000 and based in Columbus, Ohio, 2Checkout.com (2CO) is a global payments solutions provider servicing approximately 60,000 online retailers. 2CO provides businesses a merchant account alternative and a fully automated suite of backend services, including world-class fraud, customer care, PCI data storage, and multiple payment methods in multiple currencies and languages. For more information visit http://www.2checkout.com.

When used in conjunction with our Instant Notification System and CGI purchase parameters, the API will enable the creation of sophisticated and powerful order management systems.

We are currently conducting a private beta for the first 10 API calls. If you are a 2Checkout vendor or a software developer who would like to participate in this beta program, please send an email to techsupport@2co.com that includes the following information:

• Your Name
• Your 2CO Supplier ID Number(s)
• Your Preferred Email Address

If you are a third party software developer, we would like to know the name, and anything else you would like to tell us about, of the product you develop.

After confirming the submitted account information, we will begin contacting those selected to participate, in the coming weeks.

The First 10 API Calls:

• acct/detail_company_info
• acct/detail_contact_info
• sales/create_comment
• sales/detail_sale
• sales/list_sales
• sales/mark_shipped
• sales/reauth
• sales/refund_invoice
• sales/refund_lineitem
• sales/stop_lineitem_recurring

The current supported methods offered by our API allow the user to retrieve:

• Detailed account information including both company and contact information.
• Detailed payment information for both pending and past payments.
• Detailed product information including product options and coupons.
• Detailed sales information supporting both simple and complex search queries.

The current supported update calls allow the user to:

• Create, edit and delete products, product options and coupons.
• Refund sales by both invoice and individual line item.
• Stop recurring line items.
• Reauthorize and mark sales as shipped.
• Add order comments and send comments to the customer.

If you are interested, please review our Back Office API documentation for a full specification on each supported method and instructions on how to create an API username.

For site integration with 2Checkout, we offer a Common Gateway Interface (CGI). This means a site will need to contain an HTML form or link with cgi parameters appended which passes the correct parameters (and the customer) to our site for checkout. Passing in the Proper Parameters will result in the customer going through the rest of our checkout process (such as entering their credit card information), and after verification, a successful sale.

A site/shopping cart can pass orders into our purchase routine by using one of our supported parameter sets listed below.

• Plug n Play parameters
• Pass Through Products parameters
• Third party cart parameters
• Authorize.net parameters

When using a third party cart parameter set you will need to make sure that you implement the Product Identification parameters listed in the articles above.

If you would like to test your integration of these parameter sets, please try using the testing tools available in our developers area.

This article was updated January 27, 2010 to include the new Back Office API information.