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At its second annual developer conference, PayPal announced new mobile technologies and business relationships that will change the way people shop and pay.
PayPal announced the availability of Mobile Express Checkout, a secure two-click checkout experience on a mobile device. Consumers will have the ability to opt in and remain logged in across apps to make purchasing even faster. PayPal says the solution is easy to deploy for any merchants who already have Express Checkout on their online stores. Beta merchants have reported double-digit sales growth on their mobile stores after adding Mobile Express Checkout.
Businesses including Starbucks will use Mobile Express Checkout for quick and easy reload of Starbucks Cards directly from its Starbucks Card Mobile app for iPhone and iPod Touch.
PayPal is a leader in mobile payments. The company offers mobile apps for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, as well as tools to help developers and merchants build mobile-commerce solutions. PayPal expects more than $700 million in mobile payments to go through its system by the end of 2010. PayPal announced the news at its 2010 Innovate conference in San Francisco on Oct. 26.
“Mobile commerce is the most significant change in retailing in the last century, and shopping will never be the same,” said Osama Bedier, PayPal’s vice president of platform, mobile and new ventures. “PayPal is aggressively driving this change by redefining checkout on mobile devices for millions of consumers and businesses across the world.”
PayPal also announced that guest payments, the ability to accept credit card payments in addition to PayPal, will be integrated into Mobile Express Checkout in the first quarter of next year.
In addition, PayPal is adding key functionality to its Mobile Payments Library by supporting preapproved, chain and split payments. Developers can now use preapproved payments for subscription-based business models and use split and chained payments to take a cut of transactions between buyers and sellers. As with Mobile Express Checkout, consumers can opt in and remain logged in across apps to make purchasing even faster.
And a new location-based feature allows PayPal iPhone app users to find businesses accepting PayPal wherever they happen to be. Merchants can attract nearby customers to their stores by sending deals and promotions to customers’ phones, and customers can pay for goods or services at local outlets with PayPal or a BlingTag from Bling Nation. This new local service is initially available in beta in the San Francisco Bay Area. Interested merchants or service providers can sign up at www.paypal-labs.com/local.
In other news from the conference, PayPal announced that VeriFone is joining the PayPal developer ecosystem and will be the first device manufacturer to collaborate with PayPal to offer merchants the ability to take credit card and PayPal payments anywhere using its PAYWare mobile merchant app. The new service will also let customers “bump to pay” using functionality from Bump Technologies built into the PayPal app and the PAYWare app. This will allow the millions of PayPal merchants who have both an online and offline presence to accept payments wherever they happen to be.
PayPal also has teamed up with Appcelerator, maker of a platform for mobile, desktop and iPad applications, to make it easy for PayPal’s 8 million merchants to create mobile commerce apps. Appcelerator allows merchants to build apps on all three major mobile platforms-iOS, Android and BlackBerry-from one Web code base. PayPal and Appcelerator expect to launch the joint mobile commerce offering in 2011.
PayPal, a division of eBay, has been delivering mobile payments since 2005 and has a mobile app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry smartphones, as well as SMS and WAP-based payments solutions. PayPal offers merchants an easy way for shoppers to check out on mobile Websites via Mobile Express Checkout, and mobile developers can use PayPal for in-app payments using PayPal’s Mobile Payments Library. In 2009, $141 million in payments were transacted over PayPal’s mobile applications and PayPal expects to close out 2010 with more than $700 million in mobile payment volume from 5 million PayPal members worldwide.