One of the biggest names in mobile commerce has been one of the biggest names for a long time now, and that’s none other than PayPal. However, PayPal has had a bit of an issue in the mobile commerce set for some time, and that’s a lack of ways to just route cash directly to individual users.
That’s about to change, though, with the development of PayPal.Me, a development that will help drive a new direction for PayPal in mobile: peer-to-peer.
The move to PayPal.Me is essentially in response to a growing desire on people’s parts to offer up casual payment to others, one of the biggest uses of a regular cash wallet. Whether it’s paying off a bar bet or paying off someone for buying all of lunch when they should have just paid half, such smaller, simpler transactions are desirable and represent one of the biggest things many mobile wallets need to effectively do to get interest in the product line going.
PayPal actually has a similar operation in place called Venmo, which has processed around $1.6 billion in payments just in the second quarter of 2015 alone. That’s a change of 247 percent from last year, showing that this is a major new arena.
Essentially, people will able to send links from PayPal.Me by a text message, by an email, or any available chat service according to reports. If both users have a PayPal account, the transaction reportedly goes through as easily as it does in the desktop version. Users can even get a customized URL, so PayPal links can reflect a favorite website, comic strip, book, or other property, or just look sufficiently mysterious to be extra fun.
For those who think this isn’t such a big deal, as it turns out, it is; a survey of 4,000 users across Australia, Germany, Canada and the United States revealed that the Canadians were owed on average $460 by various friends, and these money issues have actually cost about a third of them friendships outright.
Having an easy way to rapidly repay small-scale casual loans is a great idea, if for this reason more than any other. It also doesn’t hurt to give PayPal a little extra boost in the market, which given the sheer number of mobile payment options in the field, makes a particular sense. It’s also a help to the smaller vendor; the guy at the farmer’s market or the like doesn’t need a complete Square system to handle business with a tool like PayPal.Me, though admittedly, it might still be a good idea to cover the straight credit / debit card traffic.
Still, there’s plenty of possibility afoot with PayPal.Me, and with so many potential uses afoot, this could give PayPal a little extra boost that it’ll need thanks to its recent departure from eBay. Only time will tell if it’s enough of a boost to keep it viable long-term, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
