(December 14, 2006) PayPal Inc., the online payment service of online auction firm eBay Inc., has signed another big company in its quest to expand beyond eBay users, and the processor says more such clients are coming next year. This week, Monster, the leading online job-search and recruitment service, said it has begun accepting PayPal on its e-commerce site. Monster and PayPal are pitching the service mostly as an alternative payment option for the thousands of small businesses that use Monster for recruiting purposes.

San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal says Monster is the first of the leading online job sites to become a client. Asked if PayPal is talking with Monster rivals such as CareerBuilder.com or Yahoo! Inc.’s HotJobs, a PayPal spokesperson said, in an e-mail message to Digital Transactions News, “While we can't disclose which specific merchants we’re in the process of bringing on board, we can say that PayPal is speaking with a number of major e-commerce sites in a variety of industries. You'll see a lot more large, well-known brands accepting PayPal in 2007.”

PayPal for the past two years has been steadily diversifying its processing base beyond its parent company’s online auctions. As of the third quarter, it derived 37% of its transaction volume from non-auction sources, up from 32% a year earlier (Digital Transactions News, Oct. 25). Most recently, Hewlett Packard Co. and Barnes & Noble Inc. have started accepting PayPal on their sites.

With Monster, PayPal has also found a major source of small-business transactions. Adopting PayPal is “really part of this overall company initiative for making transacting with us easier, especially for small businesses,” a Monster spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News. Monster already accepts Visa, MasterCard, and American Express for online payments and also offers an invoicing option. A basic, single job posting costs an employer $395 for 60 days, though Monster offers volume discounts, one-time promotions, and other options that affect pricing.

Monster and PayPal are no strangers to each other. Monster was a user of the Internet gateway service that PayPal bought last year from VeriSign Inc. in a $370 million deal that brought 100,000-plus merchants to PayPal (Digital Transactions News, Oct. 10, 2005). “It made sense for Monster to add PayPal, especially as it increases its focus on small businesses using its online recruiting site,” the PayPal spokesperson said. “PayPal works with millions of small businesses, and now those businesses can use their PayPal accounts to pay for employee recruiting services with Monster.”

Neither Monster nor PayPal would disclose financials about their deal, but the Monster spokesperson says employers will not pay fees for using PayPal.

Monster is a division of New York City-based Monster Worldwide Inc., which has its main operations center in Maynard, Mass. For the third quarter, Monster reported revenues from continuing operations of $285.9 million, up 38% from $206.8 million a year earlier.