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Ask HN: Why there's not a “better dashboard app” built on top of PayPal API?
Paypal dashboard for developers (I mean apps using the Paypal API to collect payments automatically, but you get this confusion, it is because Paypal is confusing) is very bad.
It is limited, it is kinda slow, the session expires in a few minutes, it doesn't show all the data it could show, it doesn't allow you to perform actions manually or use it in any practical way besides setting an "app" and getting API keys.
At the same time, Stripe has a dashboard that has all these features and probably more. It is a pleasure to use (for sandbox testing, first-time implementers and for small apps with low revenue, at least). Also, there are services like Baremetrics that add features to these.
The question is: why not build an app that accepts Paypal token and secret and makes all the needed API calls automatically to display a nicer and friendlier dashboard for developers?
It sounds like a thing that should and could be done, but for some reason I can't find anything about this, not even someone suggesting it, on Google. Why is that? Am I missing something pretty obvious here?
(I'm not missing the fact that some people wouldn't handle their API secrets to a third-party service, because we know some would, and that's not bad, you're already trusting Paypal with your money, and probably others with even more valuable things -- but, if this is really a serious issue, this app could be an open source client-side app that runs locally, it doesn't need to be SaaS.)
- fiatjaf 11y agoFor people not getting how bad the Paypal dashboard is, here's an anedoctal example of its badness in action: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27276797/paypal-show-sandbox-transactions http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27276797/paypal-show-sand... (But I would also like to say that the dashboard is in fact getting better recently, along with the REST API and its documentation.)