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.
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