PayPal’s Instant Checkout Platform One Touch Goes Live In Over A Dozen More Markets

PayPal today expanded its instant checkout service known as One Touch to 13 new markets worldwide, including a wide swath of European countries along with Australia. The system, which lets mobile and web users use PayPal to pay for purchases without having to continually re-enter their username and password across merchants’ sites or apps, has also now been rolled out to 100 percent of eligible U.S. customers, the company also notes.

The idea with OneTouch is to simplify checkout process by allowing customers to stay logged into PayPal across different applications. The way the technology works is that, the first time a shopper uses PayPal, they will have to enter in their username and password as they would normally, but afterward, they can pay with PayPal without having to re-authenticate each time.

The technology is something of an alternative to rival payments platform Stripe, which has grown popular with a number of well-known web brands like Rackspace, Shopify, Reddit, Foursquare, Dailymotion and others. PayPal OneTouch also competes with the OS makers Apple and Google’s own payment platforms, Apple Pay and Android Pay (reportedly launching today), which also support in-app purchases.

However, PayPal’s advantage in this fight is its previously established footprint with online merchants. The company says that over half of the Internet Retailer 500 and hundreds of thousands of merchants worldwide have enabled OneTouch, including Overstock.com, Eat24, The Home Depot and Beyond the Rack. When the service became available to web merchants, Airbnb, Boxed, Jane.com, Lyft, Munchery, and YPlan were among the first adopters.

Plus, “millions” of customers have opted in to use OneTouch since its debut, the company notes.

Because it eases the checkout process, some merchants also report seeing as much as 50 percent or greater improvements in conversion rates after using OneTouch.

PayPal additionally makes the transition easier for merchants, as it automatically enables the system for those eligible, so they don’t have to do any integration work on their side.

The expansion sees OneTouch now reaching over a dozen new markets, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. In total, there are now 16 countries that support OneTouch, following its earlier launches in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.