PayPal Credit Users To Get a Card for In-Store Use

Consumers with PayPal Credit accounts soon will be eligible for a new Mastercard Inc. branded card to use in store with their accounts.

Announced Tuesday, the new card taps consumer credit lines in their PayPal Credit accounts, which are issued by Synchrony Financial. PayPal Credit accounts have been most associated with e-commerce transactions. The new card, a first for PayPal Credit accounts, joins the PayPal Cashback Mastercard, a traditional credit card, for in-store use. PayPal says eligible PayPal Credit users will be notified in coming weeks with the cards also arriving in that time frame.

With the new card, consumers will be able to able to extend the online PayPal credit lines into the physical world, something PayPal has long championed. In 2012, it rolled out PayPal acceptance at the point of sale in almost 2,000 Home Depot Inc. stores. That was discontinued in 2018. In 2013, it signed a deal with Alliance Data Systems Corp. to enable PayPal acceptance at merchants enrolled in a program from the Alliance Data Retail Services subsidiary. Alliance is now Bread Financial.

“Bringing customers another physical card option to use for everyday purchases gives them greater purchasing power both on and offline,” Bart Schaller, Synchrony executive vice president and chief executive, says in a statement. In 2017, PayPal and Synchrony extended their partnership.

PayPal Credit’s origins extend to Bill Me Later, an online credit line that eBay Inc., which owned PayPal at the time, acquired in 2008.

PayPal says as of the end of the first quarter it has 436 million active users, but does not disclose how many of them are PayPal Credit users.