Additionally, PayPal accounts can be linked to special debit
cards, which allows purchases to be made at brick-and-mortar stores using the money
in a PayPal account. You can learn more about PayPal at http://www.paypal.com/.
Individuals who do a great deal of business online frequently use PayPal as a convenient
way to spend and receive money. In those cases, reporting on data from PayPal can
provide important information about financial transactions, as demonstrated in the
example in this chapter.
Gathering Data from PayPal
You can take a couple approaches to gathering PayPal data for analysis. One is to use Pay-
Pal??™s web API to download transaction information. Unfortunately, results from searches
via the PayPal web API are limited to 100 transactions, which makes it implausible to analyze
any significant amount of data.
nTip This chapter covers reporting on PayPal transactions. If you would like your application to be able
to accept payments via PayPal, you can do that with the paypal gem, available from http://dist.
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