Barclays Could Close Some UK Branches as Mobile Grows

Discover’s ability to introduce PayPal at the point of sale is making impressive gains in the targeted brick-and-mortar businesses.

Many name-brand retailers such as Nordstrom, Burger King, and Sephora have agreed to place the PayPal’s acceptance sticker at point-of-sale terminals. But for one retailer, the door is still closed: Wal-Mart.

From Reuters:

We do not see the value proposition for brick and mortar merchants to accept PayPal in-store as it is an aggregation of tender types already accepted in-store at a higher cost and complexity to the merchant,” Wal-Mart spokesman Randy Hargrove wrote in a recent email to Reuters. He declined to comment further.

This position lays out the competitive market the industry is facing in the not-too-distant future, which has everything to do with data ownership, brand management, and control over the consumer experience and less about authorizing and settling a payment. Amazon is another major retailer who does not accept PayPal and, like Wal-Mart, has been working on a proprietary payment method.

However, regardless of whether these giants are creating their own payment method, without a proven adoption number, and with an arguably higher cost of acceptance than a regulated debit card for example, one wonders what the incentive is to them to open this payment form to their customers. eBay’s ownership of the brand probably doesn’t support the argument either, since they are retail competitors as well.

In the meantime, however, PayPal’s alliance with Discover has been highly successful gaining it entry to the larger retail market. With this larger acceptance footprint in place, now PayPal needs to deliver consumers and we would expect to see a larger incentive strategy, perhaps a national marketing campaign to follow sometime this year.

Click here to read more from Reuters via Fox Business News.