Payments giant PayPal is going through a transition. New President David Marcus has been trying to reinvent the company, restructuring product strategy and more. There are even reports of layoffs, as Marcus is overhauling the organization. Today, the company is debuting its first ever national marketing campaign featuring actor Jeff Goldblum. You can view the campaign here. → Read More
PayPal spokesperson Anuj Nayar put up an interesting blog post today about how the company wants to be branded with regard to payments in the future. Basically, the company doesn’t want to be pigeonholed into being just a mobile payments company. → Read More
It’s not easy for a $63 billion company to make a successful pivot, but if eBay manages to pull it off, it will be one for the history books. The e-commerce giant has been shifting focus from being primarily a marketplace to a mobile commerce giant with a dash of personalization. And there are serious signs of life. eBay did a staggering $5 billion in mobile commerce last year and expects to see … → Read More
It seems that every week there’s a new company, startup, or financial institution that is launching a new way to pay from, issue rewards, or power transactions from a mobile phone. The question that always lingers in my mind when I see yet another mobile payments service pop up—how many more ways do we need to pay for a physical or digital product via a mobile device?
Matrix Partners’ Dana… → Read More
PayPal has been steadily expanding its newly launched in-store payments platform to specific retailers, including Home Depot, Abercrombie & Fitch, JC Penney, Jamba Juice and a number of other retailers. But today, the payments giant is announcing a huge partnership which should help expand the presence of its payments platform in merchants and stores in a more meaningful way. PayPal is… → Read More
Online payments startup WePay is today announcing lowered pricing and new API features, as it celebrates the one-year anniversary of its WePay Payments API. The company, which is backed by $19.2 million in venture funding, is actually a bit older than just one year, however. As you may remember, WePay first emerged from Y Combinator in 2009 as a simple tool to collecting group payments. The… → Read More
eBay has just released its second quarter 2012 earnings report, in which the eCommerce giant outpaced expectations for yet another quarter. Revenue increased 23% to $3.4 billion, compared to the same period of 2011. Non-GAAP earnings came in at $0.56 per diluted share. Analysts expected earnings of $0.55 per share on revenue of $3.36 billion. Net income came in at $692 million for the… → Read More
PayPal announced today that it has acquired card.io, its partner company that allows developers to use a smartphone to capture credit information.
In the mobile payments space that is becoming increasingly crowded with major players like Square and Google Wallet and minor upstarts like Venmo, PayPal has acquired its first company in over a year. While last year’s moves were aimed at mobile… → Read More
The online and mobile payments markets have seen a number of disruptions — from slashing fees for processing to turning mobile handsets into card processing devices — but many of those efforts have been aimed at the consumer segment. Today, Traxpay, a German payments startup focused on online payments in the business-to-business segment, is announcing its own advance in this space: it has raised… → Read More
PayPal, the eBay-owned online payments service that is making significant inroads into mobile, is giving its website an overhaul to make it easier for its 100 million+ users to pay and get paid, find help, and potentially start using some of the newer services that PayPal is pushing hard to grow. The redesign also happens to look a lot more touch-friendly — perhaps a sign of how much tablets… → Read More
Today PayPal opened up a new front in its strategy to expand its role in mobile payments, a business PayPal projects will generate it $7 billion in revenue this year. The eBay-owned payments company today launched a new retail mobile payments app for iOS and Android devices, PayPal InStore, where users can create barcodes that get scanned to deduct payments from users’ PayPal accounts. → Read More
PayPal and mobile operator Softbank are getting together to launch a joint venture in Japan that should extend the payment subsidiary’s reach in Asia.
It’s a 50-50 effort for PayPal, which is owned by eBay, and Softbank. Each company is investing 1 billion Japanese yen or $12.5 million into the venture and they’ll each pick three directors. Softbank Mobile’s director and senior vice president… → Read More
As NFC continues to see growing adoption, we are still noticing more mobile payment solutions that don’t use the technology picking up traction — and funding: one of the latest comes from Germany, where a Berlin-based company called Orderbird has picked up a €2.7 million ($3.5 million) round for a service that lets restaurants use iOS devices to take customer food orders, send them to the… → Read More
ifeelgoods has a brilliant idea — letting you earn Facebook Credits for ecommerce purchases or following a brand on Twitter — but now it has to convince big companies and shopping sites to adopt its tech. That’s why it’s hired former Google Managing Director of Commerce Sales and leader of PayPal’s enterprise sales team Tyler Hoffman to be its new Senior Vice President of Sales.
ifeelgoods… → Read More
During eBay’s earnings call today, eBay CEO and President John Donahoe said that over 200,000 merchants have signed up for PayPal Here, the company’s Square-like mobile payments hardware and software platform for small businesses. We haven’t seen any sign-up numbers for the mobile payments service since PayPal revealed it was seeing 1,000 new registrants per hour for the new service.
As you… → Read More
As we heard over the past few months, PayPal is ramping up its payments options for large and small merchants. The payments giant debuted an in-store payments platform for large retailers; PayPal Here, a card swiper that attaches to a mobile phone for small businesses; and hinted at a brand new PayPal wallet. Today, PayPal is rebranding its services for small businesses as PayPal Payments, which… → Read More
There’s no shortage of apps that help people find cheap gas these days, but apps that let you pay for it? And ones that give you a discount for doing it? Sign me up. The Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner reports that regional gas station/convenience store chain Cumberland Farms has done just that with their new SmartPay app, which in addition to letting users pay without leaving their seats, offers… → Read More
eBay CEO John Donahoe announced this morning that David Marcus, the former CEO and founder of mobile payments startup Zong and PayPal Mobile VP, will be taking over as PayPal’s president. As you may know, former president Scott Thompson departed PayPal in January to be Yahoo’s CEO. Marcus joined PayPal last year when the payments giant acquired Zong for $240 million. Marcus stepping into the top… → Read More
After former president Scott Thompson departed for the CEO role at Yahoo, PayPal has named David Marcus, the former CEO and founder of mobile payments startup Zong and PayPal Mobile VP, as President (PayPal acquired Zong last year for $240 million). Ebay CEO and acting PayPal president John Donahoe posted the news this morning in a blog post.
From PayPal’s blog post: [Marcus is] going to lead… → Read More
Hot on the heels of the launch of its new Here mobile payment dongle in the U.S., PayPal is joining the ranks of companies looking to get a piece of the action in what will, this year, become the world’s largest smartphone market: China.
The company says it is “cautiously optimistic” that it will become the first non-Chinese company to get a license to process domestic electronic payments … → Read More
PayPal today unveiled its new global payment platform for SMBs, PayPal Here, which brings the veteran payments solution into local stores with a new mobile app-card reader solution to rival Square. The in-store payment solution, which begins rolling out to merchants today, features a triangular card-reader, or dongle, that merchants can use to swipe cards of all varieties to start accepting mobile… → Read More
We’re at the PayPal event in San Francisco today where the ePayments giant has officially pulled back the curtain on its payment solution for small businesses. The news has been trickling out over the last few weeks now, as Leena reported last week on the fact that the company was prepping for the launch of an in-store payments system focused on smaller merchants. And that they have, with PayPal… → Read More
This just in… As we reported it would do yesterday, PayPal has today issued a significant update to its acceptable use policy regarding payments for certain erotica-themed e-books.
Now the eBay-owned payments company says that it will only prohibit using its payment system for specific books — not entire classes of books — and that it will only apply to those publications that contain… → Read More
A development in the ongoing story about PayPal and requirements it made on e-book distributors to remove certain kinds of erotica from their catalogs: there are signs the eBay-owned company could be preparing to reverse its position as early as this week, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The digital rights group has been among those meeting with the payments company in recent… → Read More
We’ve been hearing recently about PayPal’s in-store payments platform for large retailers (which will soon be rolled out to small businesses as well). But we haven’t seen PayPal do much in the past few months with its plans for its digital wallet on the consumer side. We know PayPal has a major vision for how payments will be made in the future, but today, the company is giving us a glimpse of… → Read More
In addition to partnering with large retailers, it looks like PayPal is going to be launching a set of payments offerings for small businesses as well. We just received an invitation for an event PayPal is hosting next week, which will unveil what the payments company has in store for a solution for small businesses.
We’ve heard that similar to PayPal’s recently introduced in-store payments… → Read More
The independent book world has been beset on all sides recently. When the first e-publishers began to go to bat for independent and self-published authors, the writing world rejoiced. For too long the rapacious vanity press had taken their money and offered little in return. There is very little up-front investment for self-published authors except for a good story and a little HTML gumption and… → Read More
Back in July, PayPal shelled out over $200 million for payments platform Zong, as a way to boost mobile payments technology. As you may know, Zong lets you pay for things, particularly virtual goods online, via direct billing to your mobile phone. According to an announcement made by eBay today, PayPal is looking to make these mobile carrier payments more available for online… → Read More
Adult content has long been a big draw, and one of the most profitable, in the world of digital media, but a recent move by PayPal is a sign of how one part of that business might be facing some problems up ahead.
Smashwords, an e-book distributor that competes with Amazon, has sent out a letter to the authors, publishers and literary agents that it works with to tell them that PayPal is… → Read More
PayPal recently revealed that it was testing an in-store payments technology both via mobile and point of sale systems on a ‘friends and family’ basis at Home Depot. Initially, the pilot was only for 5 stores. Today, on eBay’s earnings call eBay President and CEO (and interim PayPal president) John Donahoe revealed that PayPal will be extending the pilot to 51 Home Depot stores in the San… → Read More
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