Paying for food online with Bitcoins isn’t new. Pizzaforcoins has famously set up a site that takes Bitcoins in exchange for ordering a pie from your local Domino’s. Some entrepreneurial food purveyors online, such as Bitcoin Coffee, also deal in the digital currency. (For a detailed explanation of how the Bitcoin economy works, check out my colleague David Meyer’s comprehensive post.) But what’s interesting about Foodler is its scope.

Foodler is an online delivery and takeout portal a similar to GrubHub that hosts menus and handles orders for restaurants in 48 states, and it has made Bitcoin another option for payment alongside credit cards, debit cards and cash on delivery. You can’t pay for a pizza or your mu shu pork order with Bitcoin directly to the delivery guy, but Foodler has set up an account portal that generates a unique deposit address and QR code, which customers can use to deposit their Bitcoins. Using the current USD exchange rate, Foodler turns them into FoodlerBucks, which can then be used to pay for orders and even tip through its online portal or mobile app.

It might sound like a marketing gimmick, but Foodler CEO Christian Dumontet said the company is firm believer in innovation, whether it’s technological, economic or, in the case of Bitcoin, both.

“We understand that Bitcoin users are a small, but influential, group of early adopters and Bitcoin orders will likely be a small percentage of all Foodler payments this year, but as early adopters ourselves, we are excited to support the community and help it grow,” Dumontet said in an email. “We were surprised to receive our first Bitcoin payment from a customer in San Francisco just hours after making it available in our system – prior to any kind of public announcement.”

Of course, given the recent nosedive in Bitcoin value, some people may be reluctant to part with their Bitcoins just yet – it would take four times the amount of Bitcoin to buy an $8 burrito today than it did last week. Still, Dumontet isn’t letting the volatility of the crypto-currency phase him. He said would Foodler would hold on to the some of the Bitcoins it does receive, instead of immediately cashing them in for U.S. dollars, and it plans to participate in the Bitcoin economy by seeking out vendors that accept the currency.

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First off, it’s launching a new iOS software developer’s kit (SDK), which allows app makers to code PayPal’s payment processing tools directly into their apps, instead of opening up a PayPal authorization and payments page. PayPal devs can also embed credit card scanning software from Card.io, which PayPal bought last summer. While it’s starting with iOS, PayPal said it would expand to other mobile platforms “soon.”

For quick integration, PayPal has developed Javascript buttons that can be embedded into a desktop or mobile website by adding five lines of codes. The payment feature can also be programmed into a QR code, allowing retailers to trigger transactions from outside of the device. Finally, PayPal is also retooling its application programming interfaces (APIs) around more modern and open frameworks such as REST, OAuth and JSON.

Previously, PayPal’s development platform ran over parent company eBay’s X.commerce, but PayPal is taking its developer efforts independent, launching a new development website that houses its sandbox, tools, documentation and other resources in a single location.

“This is just the beginning,” PayPal CTO James Barrese wrote on the company’s blog. “We will be releasing new APIs and capabilities throughout 2013, while continuing to support our existing developer tools through this evolution. We will continue to listen to the developer community and rapidly respond to their feedback.”

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Ribbon, a new stealth startup with seed funding from Draper Associates, is now trying to get into the act with a commerce tool that it believes is even more flexible for sellers. Like Gumroad, it allows people to create a link that allows customers to buy a product, either digital or physical. And like Chirpify, which works on Twitter and Instagram, or Soldsie, which enables sales through Facebook, Ribbon is also designed to work well within existing social channels.

Using one URL, Ribbon can customize the experience for each platform. So if a person clicks on a link in Facebook, they can get taken to a Facebook app, where they can enter in their payment info and check-out. In Twitter, which doesn’t have its own app platform, a user will get taken to a special page made for Twitter users. Tumblr and WordPress users can also include their own Ribbon button that pulls up a window inside their site through which visitors can buy from. The service also works with YouTube and Pinterest, so a seller can show a video or a picture of a product or performance and then ask a viewer to purchase afterward.

Ribbon founder Hany Rashwan told me the service has built its own payment infrastructure to handle all credit cards, which allows it to save on interchange fees and pay out to sellers through the mail, wire transfers, ACH transfers and also PayPal. He said that separates it from other competitors like Chirpify, which works through PayPal or Gumroad, which was built using Stripe’s APIs.

He believes that Ribbon is also a more powerful tool for selling on a number of platforms since it can provide a different experience for users based on where they click on a link. And with one account, users can buy from multiple platforms without having to enable Ribbon each time.

“The idea is, selling happens wherever the buyer is. I don’t want the buyer to have to leave the experience they’re on because that hurts conversions, ” Rashwan said.

Rashwan started coding when he was 11 years old and made more than $200,000 as a teenager running advertising-supported fan sites for popular games. He attended Ohio State before dropping out to pursue his startup dreams. The idea for Ribbon came after he and a friend complained about the check-out process for many online transactions, which can often take people out of their original website. What began as a way to simplify the checkout process become Ribbon.

The service, which has been been in private alpha for the last month, charges 5 percent + 30 cents per transaction. That’s a little more expensive than Gumroad, which charges 5 percent + 25 cents per transaction.

I’m excited to see more selling tools emerge. We’re creating a new economy that allows anyone to become a merchant. Platforms like Etsy and Shopify have made it simple to become an online seller. But services like Ribbon, Gumroad and Chirpify are making it even easier for anyone to start doing business. This is also important as people spend more time on mobile devices. With simple tools like this, it makes it easy for someone to make quick impulse buys from a mobile device.

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For merchants who participate, they will be able to offer Bill Me Later as an option at checkout and will get paid right away from PayPal. There is no upper limit for how much people can finance using Bill Me Later, and the transaction is approved or denied within about one minute. If a consumer takes longer than six months to pay off their purchase, they will pay an annual percentage rate of 19.99 percent.

PayPal is also providing business owners with 18 different types of banner ads that can be easily inserted into their home page or check-out page to highlight the Bill Me Later option.

This should be helpful for consumers who might be a little hesitant to make bigger purchases due to the tough economy. For businesses, offering Bill Me Later could push someone to add a few more items to their shopping carts if they’re short of a the $99 threshold. Forrester Research found that 43 percent of Bill Me Later sales are in addition to regular online sales and offering Bill Me Later boosted average order sizes by as much as 75 percent.

Previously, Bill Me Later was included as a funding source in the PayPal wallet, but it was almost always used by large retailers and enterprise customers. The financing offers were not consistent from one retailer to another. And merchants didn’t have a simple way of advertising the Bill Me Later option.

PayPal has been testing Bill Me Later with some small merchants and some are reporting larger average purchases through the service and a bigger percentage of sales flowing through PayPal as well.

By expanding the use of Bill Me Later, PayPal continues to show how it can become an alternative to traditional credit cards. And it demonstrates how PayPal’s purchase of Bill Me Later in 2008 is now paying off for the online payment giant. Morgan Stanley noted in March that Bill Me Later improves PayPal’s transaction margins because it’s paid off through ACH transfers or check; it generates substantial income through interest and helps eBay monetize its off-shore cash, which it uses to cover Bill Me Later transactions.

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With Stripe Connect, an online store creator like Shopify or a service like Skillshare, both of whom are customers, can easily enable their sellers to accept payment immediately via Stripe without having to go through the drawn out process of getting a merchant account. Previously, some of their merchants might have manually added Stripe as a payment tool by copying and pasting in API keys, but now these platforms can offer Stripe to all of their sellers. Stripe Connect will be available in the US and Canada, which received Stripe service last month.

Stripe hasn’t said how many customers it has but Stripe Connect is likely to increase the number of merchants that turn to Stripe for payments. Reddit will use Stripe Connect to help communities accept donations while online form builder WuFoo will make it easy for customers to accept one-click payments in their online forms. Fundraising platform Razoo will be able to make payments easier for its non-profit customers.

Stripe Connect won’t just widen payment acceptance, it will also allow customers to connect their payment data easily into analytics tools, CRM systems and accounting software. With Stripe’s API opening up a standardized way to access payment data, customers can plug in a number of tools to better understand what their payment data is telling them. SumAll, for example, will allow Stripe Connect users to see their real-time transaction data along with their web and social data.

In its first year on the market, Stripe has won over a lot of developers and enterprise customers, who appreciate the way the San Francisco company has simplified payment acceptance, making it as easy as connecting to any other API. Stripe has raised $38 million to date including a $20 million round in July with a valuations whispered as high as $1 billion.

Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder, said Stripe Connect, which has been in private beta for six months, is the biggest thing the startup has done since it launched. He expects Stripe Connect can enable a lot more people to participate in the Internet economy.

“So many people on the web should be transacting but they aren’t. This should increase that exponentially,” Collison said.

Collison said previously that the Internet is opening up a lot of opportunities to promote commerce, everything from collaborative consumption startups like Airbnb to online marketplace like Shopify and Etsy.

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Stripe is answering its most frequently asked question — when will you expand beyond the US — with the launch of service in Canada Wednesday. The move follows a limited beta in Canada in the summer with companies including Tarsnap, MetaLab, and Shopify. Now developers north of the border will be able to take advantage of Stripe’s flat pricing, instant setup and the ability to accept all major credit cards.

Expanding to Canada may not sound that challenging but it’s a big step for Stripe. Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder said Canada presented unique problems because it’s controlled by legacy payment processors and also lacks needed infrastructure and facilities. The company had to work with American Express and Wells Fargo, who built custom software to enable the Stripe system to work.

Previously, the process of setting up online payments in Canada was often frustrating for businesses, who had to work mightily to get set up by banks. It could often take months to get approved for a merchant account.

Tobias Lütke, founder of Shopify, said it took months of pleading and thousands of dollars for unnecessary security audits to convince the banks to let it accept payments. And even though it has integrated with 100 different payment systems, he said none of those implementations was as easy as Stripe.

Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison

Collison said moving into Canada has meant Stripe has had to start handling new currencies besides the American dollar. And it’s also learning different ways to acquire information from international businesses. That investment though will pay off as Stripe moves into new markets around the world. Ultimately, Stripe’s goal is  bring payments to anywhere on the Internet, Collison said.

“A lot of the work we did to support more than one country will make it easier to move to other countries,” said Collison. “We’ve put a foundation in place to make this a global payment infrastructure.”

Stripe’s international growth can be good for a seller in Kenya who can’t process payments in Europe or the US. But it’s also helpful for many American startups who struggle with global expansion because setting up payments in each country requires a lot of expertise. If Stripe can expand to a lot of international markets, it can enable a lot more online commerce. It’s going to take some time, but with Canada under Stripe’s belt, we might see more countries on board soon.

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WePay keeps visitors on the original website using a secure iFrame. Pricing is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for credit cards and 1 percent plus 30 cents for bank payments.

The new payment buttons build off the work WePay has done to improve its payment APIs, which celebrated their first birthday earlier this month. With the newest APIs, WePay reduced its pricing and made it simpler for partners to take payments without redirecting them outside the original site. Now, it’s making it even easier to include payments without needing any programming skills.

“We want to make accepting payments on your site as easy as embedding a YouTube video, and I believe we’ve done that. No other payment company allows you to accept payments on your own site, without requiring a redirect or any programming whatsoever,” said WePay CEO Bill Clerico.

This should be a boon for small businesses and individuals, who want to take payments but aren’t always savvy about how to do it. And it heightens the competition with PayPal, Stripe and Braintree, which are some of the more popular ways developers handle payments.

As Clerico told me recently, there’s a big opportunity in serving small merchants, especially as collaborative consumption also heats up. WePay is hoping to stand out by being very simple to work with for businesses that want to start accepting payments quickly.

WePay, a Y-Combinator graduate that has raised $19.2 million to date, still has a ways to go to compete with the likes of PayPal. But the company said it’s now processing hundreds of millions of dollars annually and is adding more than 1,000 customers a week.

WePay may not have to steal away a lot of customers from PayPal. With the growth of platforms like Etsy and Shopify, there’s an explosion of creators using the web to sell. And with more peer-to-peer services popping up, there’s more opportunities to offer simple payment services.

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The truth is, the valuation is actually in the hundreds of millions, not quite half a billion dollars, according to people I’ve talked to. But it’s still a big number for a company that has been working largely in stealth mode and has yet to release any firm customer metrics. And it’s going against big names like PayPal, Visa and Braintree, which is already a favorite of many developers. So is Stripe worthy of the acclaim?

The short answer is: it may not be worth $500 million now but it probably won’t be long before it is.

The company, which has raised $40 million to date, is gaining great word of mouth in the startup community for its payment system. Stripe has created a very simple, next-generation platform for developers, who can deploy payments as if they were hooking up to Amazon Web Services or telephony provider Twilio. Stripe’s developer-friendly product has won over thousands of developers and emerging entrepreneurs, who are able to start taking payments in minutes. The company counts Foursquare, Shopify, 10gen, Fast Company and many others among its customers.

Stripe users don’t have to worry about storing cards, PCI compliance, supporting different card types or dealing with banks. They just work with Stripe’s API and they’re up and running.

“Amazon Web Services was interesting not just because it had better infrastructure necessarily. But by making it so easy and so flexible to build services, different things get built,” said Patrick Collison, who co-founded Striple along with his brother John. “We hear from users that because everyone on their team can use Stripe and because we handle so much stuff for them, we make it easy to launch things and experiment and they end up with different and better products.”

Early investor Ron Conway said at a technology conference in May that Stripe was one of his favorite startups, high praise from a man backing hundreds of companies. “Stripe allows any developers on the Internet, almost through a point and click interface, to enable credit cards on their website,” he said at the time. “It allows people to monetize immediately.”

He’s just one of many big name backers who are staking money on Stripe. General Catalyst led Stripe’s latest round with follow-ons from existing investors Sequoia and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Redpoint Ventures, Chris Dixon and Box CEO Aaron Levie have also joined as new investors. PayPal co-founders Max Levchin and Elon Musk were also early investors.

Stripe is going up against some established players but the startup doesn’t necessarily see itself in competition with PayPal or Braintree. Collison said Stripe has been steadily winning business from new startups and businesses and doesn’t need to steal customers to be a success. That’s because the nature of online commerce is shifting rapidly and opening up new opportunities in the U.S. and abroad.

Now, thanks to platforms like Shopify and Etsy, there are thousands of creators that are launching their own online stores. Mobile is expanding the ability for online commerce to happen anywhere, at any time. And the rise of peer-to-peer start-ups like Uber and Airbnb are also opening up new business opportunities that didn’t exist ten years ago.

One of the biggest hurdles to realizing Stripe’s vision is the fact that it’s limited to the U.S. at present. The company has heard a chorus of requests from developers around the world who are waiting for their country to get Stripe support. Stripe last week launched a beta program in Canada, but there’s no time table for bringing the service to other countries. Collison said Europe is likely the next target after Canada.

Stripe could still hit a rough patch if the startup ecosystem collapses and the bubble bursts. But Stripe isn’t just focused on serving Silicon Valley, said Collison. He believes there’s a huge opportunity in facilitating transactions around the world.

“The overall market is growing so quickly we’d be totally fine if just only new businesses got started on Stripe,” Collison said.

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PayPal is undertaking a big reorganization that simplifies the company’s structure around a mobile theme. PayPal’s President David Marcus said Monday that the company’s product groups such as online, offline and mobile would be narrowed to just one group led by Hill Furguson, a former Zong executive who was previously leader of PayPal’s mobile unit before becoming global head of product last month.

PayPal is trying to build a more unified experience for its 110 million customers that brings a common experience to different products. For example, PayPal last week redesigned PayPal.com in attempt to be more consumer-friendly, eliminating thousands of unused pages and simplifying the log-in process. And in April, the company also reorganized its payments products for small business into one larger service called PayPal Payments making it easier for merchants to deploy online, in-person and mobile payments.

Marcus wrote in a new blog post that the new product group will be built around mobile to help accentuate the simplicity PayPal wants to deliver to consumers.

David Marcus

“Mobile is simpler by definition. Starting product designs from mobile will force the elimination of features introducing unneeded complexity,” Marcus said.

The company is also trying to simplify its financial services experience. It is combining the Americas regional organization with its Global Financial Services group under the leadership of Gary Marino, the founder and CEO of BillMeLater, which was acquired by PayPal in 2008. In other personnel news, Don Kingsborough, who has been leading PayPal’s offline payment efforts, is joining PayPal’s executive team while Rupert Keeley, the president of the Asia Pacific region is moving over to lead Europe Middle East and Africa.

Marcus is quickly putting his stamp on PayPal after being named president in March, after serving as VP of mobile. The drive toward simplicity with a mobile focus shouldn’t be surprising considering Marcus came over through the acquisition of carrier billing start-up Zong last year. Marcus helped launch PayPal Here, PayPal’s small business mobile payment product in March and then announced a big joint venture with Softbank last month to help launch PayPal Here in Japan.

PayPal has shown that mobile, which includes offline payments, is where it sees its future. The company made its name in online payments, but the much bigger opportunity is in targeting the more than 90 percent of transactions that still happen in physical retail stores. To do that, PayPal has had to get more mobile and a lot more simple. Under Marcus, the company is moving toward both.

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While Jumio is not disclosing the exact size of the investment, VentureWire pegged it at $3.3 million for a valuation of $130 million. The investment by a major bank suggests Jumio is making good headway with its payment product. Jumio and Citibank have been reportedly working on at least four initiatives since last fall. The money comes in advance of a big expansion in Asia and Australia later this week, said VentureWire.

To date, Jumio has raised $35.4 million including a $6.5 million round in March of last year led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Citi Ventures’ managing director Ramneek Gupta is  joining Jumio’s board of directors as an observer.

Last summer, Jumio introduced its Netswipe technology, which allows online retailers to easily process a debit or credit card payment by having a user just hold up their card to their webcam. Jumio has expanded the Netswipe technology to mobile with an SDK for iOS and Android. The company has also released Netverify, which allows website owners to confirm someone’s identity by having them scan their ID card with their webcam. Jumio now has more than 1,500 online customers.

With the latest rounds of funding, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company will be expanding its staff of 60 employees to more than 100 workers by the end of this year. The company’s move into mobile products pits it against Card.io, whose mobile credit card scanning technology has been winning customers like PayPal  and LevelUp. The card-scanning technology is interesting in that it provides an easy way for people to enter in credit card information. That’s one of the hold-ups for many transactions and leads to a lot of abandoned purchases.

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