PayPal Debuts A Simpler, Native Checkout Experience For Merchants And Expands Beacon Internationally

We’ve been hearing a lot about PayPal’s ambitions to integrate technology into the offline and mobile experience, with the recent launch of Beacon, a device that enables hands free checkins in stores and payments. But much of the core of PayPal’s business is its online payments and checkout technology which is used by many online merchants to enable payments. Today, the payments giant is debuting a simpler checkout experience online for merchants to embed in their e-commerce sites.

Similar the existing “pay with PayPal” technology, purchasers can click a pay with PayPal icon on a merchant’s site at checkout. But instead of being taken to a PayPal page, the entire payments experience, including logging into PayPal, choosing a credit card/account, inputting billing/shipping info and more, takes place in a small window on the retailer’s page. So you never leave the retailer at all.

PayPal says it is piloting this new checkout experience with a few partners and will make it more generally available to large merchants during the first half of this year. And PayPal plans to eventually expand this to small and medium sized merchants.

PayPal is also announcing today that tests of Beacon are expanding internationally to Australia, and soon in the U.K., Canada, France, and Germany. And the company plans to complete the integration of Beacon into the PayPal in the next few months.

It’s definitely worth noting that the payments company announced the expansion of Payment Code, a new technology that allows shopper to pay for goods using apps that generate QR Codes readable by merchants’ existing scanning devices.

Everyone in the payments world is in the race to make the online experience more simple at checkout, and thus decrease the churn rate of potential buyers. Clearly PayPal is still investing in making its online payments and checkout service a frictionless experience. How that will translate into beating out the competition, which is heating up with fast-growing Stripe in the mix, is yet to be determined.