In Time For The Holiday Shopping Season, PayPal’s In-Store Integration Will Debut At A National Retailer In Q4

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
PayPal

We know PayPal has been investing in a comprehensive solution for in-store merchants to integrate the payments service into the point of sale payments experience. Today, on eBay’s earnings call, eBay CEO John Donahoe said that the launch of the new technology will take place in the fourth quarter. He said that the in-store PayPal technology will be tested on a ‘friends and family’ basis in a national retailer in two markets.

The exact details on how this will work is still unclear, but we do know that features of this new offering will include location-based offers, making payments accessible from any device and offering more payments flexibility to customers after they’ve checked out. Users will have the ability to access realtime store inventory, receive in-store offers, and real-time location-based advertising from stores.

It should be interesting to see which national retailer will be testing the technology and how the holiday shopping season will help PayPal’s transaction volume. As for when the retailer will be announced, our best guess is early November, as per what we’ve heard.

Later in the call, Donahoe said that eBay has had a number of offline retailer approach PayPal to bring the technology to the offline experience. PayPal is picking a small number of globally, known top-tier retailers, he says. In the first half of next year, PayPal plans to roll out the technology other national retailers. It doesn’t need NFC, it can work with a card, it can work with a mobile device, he says, making it relatively easy to integrate into retailer point of sale systems.

In terms of monetization, Donahoe says that they are exploring that in the next 3-6 months. The specific retailer who will launch the integration will reveal the PayPal partnership, in the fourth quarter. Donohoe called the integration “the next chapter of the PayPal playbook.”

The payments technology helped buoy parent company eBay’s earnings for the third quarter, with PayPal bringing in $1.1 billion in revenue. In North America, PayPal is now available on 63 of top 100 Internet retailers, up from 56 last year. New merchants include Target and J.Crew. And PayPal continues to add about 1 million active registered accounts per month.


Company: PayPal
Website: paypal.com
Launch Date: December 1, 1998
Funding: $197M

PayPal is an online payments and money transfer service that allows you to send money via email, phone, text message or Skype. They offer products to both individuals and businesses alike, including online vendors, auction sites and corporate users. PayPal connects effortlessly to bank accounts and credit cards. PayPal Mobile is one of PayPal’s newest products. It allows you to send payments by text message or by using PayPal’s mobile browser. PayPal created the Gausebeck-Levchin test, which is an implementation...

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