As PayPal moves closer to its spinoff from parent eBay, the company continues to expand the services it will have to generate revenue as a standalone business. In the latest development, today PayPal is expanding One Touch on the web — a widget that lets people use PayPal to pay for goods on third-party websites without needing to re-enter passwords or their user IDs — outside of the U.S. The first markets for its international rollout will be the Canada and the UK.
The news comes just one month after PayPal first brought One Touch to the web in the U.S. That followed an initial mobile launch of the product last year. As with the initial rollout in the U.S., merchants in markets where One Touch has been turned on, who have integrated PayPal payments already into their check-outs online will be automatically upgraded, and shoppers will have the option of opting out of using the service if they prefer not to.
It also comes just ahead of Apple kicking off its annual WWDC event, where some believe the company is likely to announce an international expansion of Apple Pay. With Apple’s representing some of the chief competition for PayPal’s digital wallet, it’s key for the company to show that it’s on track to add new features, especially those that will make payments easier to make.
Conversion, indeed, is the big thing that Bill Ready, PayPal’s SVP who had been a co-founder at Venmo and Braintree — the PayPal acquisitions that are behind the One Touch tech — touted in an interview earlier. The launch of One Touch on mobile, he says, has improved conversation rates — getting shoppers to actually buy a product rather than browse for it and then abandon their shopping carts — by 50 percent.
Ready also touts that, at least for one, One Touch is a one-of-a-kind. “This is the first and only experience of its kind,” he says. “I’ve been pushing and building this since January 2013 with Venmo Touch.”
The company is not yet sharing stats on how much of a lift One Touch gives to web shopping. While it’s definitely less difficult to enter card details, passwords and any data on a keyboard than it is on a touchscreen of a smartphone or tablet, any and all data entry represents a degree of friction for users that will keep them from sealing the deal when looking to buy items online.
PayPal says that the next countries to get One Touch will be coming this summer. Ready would not detail which countries those might be, but said that the rollout of the mobile version was a good indicator of what would come next. That service is now live in Australia, France, Italy, Sweden and Spain, with more countries to come over time.
Airbnb, Boxed, Jane.com, Lyft, Munchery, YPlan are among the early merchant adopters of the new One Touch for web.