Cyber Monday Shoppers—start your engines! PayPal is turbocharging their One Touch by having over 5 million merchants in place for the annual Monday-after-Thanksgiving online shopping feast. As the following article describes, there are expanded payment partnerships as well.
PayPal touted the growth of its One Touch business—which lets PayPal users avoid having to log in multiple times from the same device—as it faces increased competition from Apple now that Apple Pay has expanded to the web.
On Thursday, PayPal said that it expects more than five million merchants will be allowing shoppers to use One Touch, and 36 million consumers will using One Touch by the end of the year. That’s up from 22 million consumers from this past spring.
One of the key challenges to mobile and web payments is being able to carry payment information—including credit cards—across mobile platforms and websites as well as shipping and billing information. Apple AAPL -0.96% and Google GOOG -0.55% are trying to do this on mobile phones with their respective mobile payments services, Apple Pay and Android Pay. Apple just expanded its payments service to web-based mobile payments as well.
In 2015, PayPal PYPL -0.69% introduced its attempt at a universal wallet called One Touch payments. With One Touch, you need only log in once with PayPal to pay for goods across different mobile apps and websites.
While PayPal is touting the growth of its number, it will likely face increased competition from Apple as its payment service expands.
Of course, while Apple and PayPal compete on consumer’s choice of the mobile wallet, the two companies are also partners. PayPal said users of its Venmo app, which allows people to send money to one another, can use iMessage and voice assistant Siri to send and receive money. PayPal’s payment processing arm, Braintree, which powers payments for merchants like Airbnb, will also now allow its merchants to add Apple Pay as a payment option for web payments.
PayPal has recently been eager to partner with card networks Visa and MasterCard, as well as mobile players including Apple Pay. PayPal’s thinking is that more transaction volume will offset the impact of lower fees. Plus it opens up new users and merchants to use PayPal’s stable of companies such as Venmo and Braintree. In any case, merchants and shoppers are beneficiaries of what continues to be a faster and frictionless mobile platform purchase experience—just in time for the Thanksgiving to Christmas buying spree.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Associate Director, Research Services at Mercator Advisory Group
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