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Having seen a significant uplift in mobile-payments volume so far this year, PayPal Inc. along with developer partners have in the past few days unveiled new products and services that could accelerate the processor's growth in this nascent market.
PayPal said it is providing payment processing for new mobile-storefront software from Magento Inc. The integration will allow merchants to accept PayPal on versions of their online stores created for display on smart phones. The news follows an announcement last week by The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish mobile-software company, that it worked with PayPal to design a new mobile-payments interface.
PayPal’s most recent mobile news comes shortly after the introduction of its mobile-payments library, a set of applications for developers building solutions for Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad devices and for phones running Google Inc.’s Android operating system. The library, which is part of the so-called open Platform X that PayPal officially launched in November, allows for integration of PayPal payments into apps involving the sale of physical goods. PayPal says the library lets consumers complete a checkout without leaving the app, in contrast to existing mobile checkout routines that require entry of credit card data, redirection to a browser, or redirection to a site to create an account.
A unit of eBay Inc., e-commerce payment processor PayPal first ventured into mobile payments four years ago with the launch of PayPal Mobile. Growth in mobile has been such that the company processed nearly as many mobile payments in the first quarter as it did all of last year, according to remarks by eBay chief executive John Donahoe in April during a conference call with Wall Street analysts (Digital Transactions News, April 22). PayPal’s mobile volume in 2009 was $141 million, a PayPal spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News. “It’s a small percentage [of total volume] right now but it’s growing very fast,” he says.
The Magento mobile software allows an online merchant to readily create a mobile app that can display items from its product catalog on a smart-phone screen. Magento has signed The North Face, a San Leandro, Calif.-based retailer of gear for mountaineers and backpackers, as its first client for the product, which is said to allow for a so-called native application rather than a recreation of an e-commerce site for mobile phones. Indeed, clients of Magento’s e-commerce platform will be able to use the product “to create a mobile app with just a few clicks,” says the PayPal spokesperson. “Merchants are excited to get on board with this.”
Users of iPhones in Sweden and the United Kingdom will be able to download an app from the merchant starting this week. Versions of Magento mobile for the iPad and for Android phones will become available later in the year, the Los Angeles-based company said.
A U.S. spokesperson for the The Astonishing Tribe, or TAT, as the company styles itself, says the company has released a new user interface for a PayPal mobile application. TAT concentrates on designing the so-called user experience in mobile technology to make it more intuitive (one of its latest apps would allow mobile-phone users to snap photos of people and find out who they are through image comparison with photos posted on sites like Facebook).
Referring to its specialty, TAT says in the announcement that “turning a great Internet service into an equally beautiful and easy-to-use mobile application is a significant user-interaction challenge.”
