Online payment giant PayPal wants to give the in-store channel another look. That’s the word coming from the company that now boasts an impressive 300 million global customer base.
In the U.S. market, most retail sales still occur in-store, so PayPal has decided that it needs to get back into that arena and will do so via a mobile app that goes beyond simply making a payment. Mobile apps that integrate features such as loyalty, order ahead, and personalized marketing offers garner much wider adoption, as Starbucks can attest.
PayPal plans a multi-featured mobile app as a go-to app for in-store shoppers. Keep in mind that the mobile app market is very crowded so it will take highly engaging features for PayPal to gain traction. But PayPal’s mega customer base is a key advantage, not to mention possible options to leverage Venmo’s entry into payment cards as well.
Expect to see the fight for the mobile wallet to become more intense among payment players in 2020.
A Business Insider article, excerpted below, covers the topic further:
The company is set to roll out new in-store payment efforts as soon as 2020, CEO Dan Schulman said in an interview with Axios. This initiative could see it introduce a digital wallet for physical stores and utilize NFC and QR code technology to enable in-store payments, and follows it removing the ability to make in-store payments via its mobile app in March 2018.
But he’s now seeing that mobile payments can enable new capabilities, like choosing to use rewards points at the point-of-sale (POS), splitting a purchase between payment methods like rewards, a debit card, and a credit card, and mobile order-ahead.
These features could make in-store payments more convenient and flexible, helping PayPal become a significant player in the space, so it’s very possible PayPal’s in-store offerings will include such capabilities as well as other financial tools like POS financing.
Notably, mobile in-store payments haven’t taken off yet in the US, as they’re projected to bring in just $76 billion in payment volume in 2019 in the country, while mobile e-commerce is set to more than double that total, but new features and values like those Schulman mentioned could help the industry take off in future years.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Director, Merchant Services at Mercator Advisory Group
