Venmo Takes A Push Into B2C With Pay With Venmo

October 19, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

For a while, Venmo looked like one of the great prospects around, one of the few peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payments systems around in a market that was so focused on the business to consumer (B2C) market that for a while that’s all anyone thought it could do. As some of the majors scramble to make up the shortfall, Venmo is quietly branching out, and thanks to the newly-minted Pay With Venmo, users can take their emoji-filled payments systems into many common retailers.

Essentially, anywhere that accepts PayPal for payment already—around two million retailers, at last report—will now take Pay With Venmo. That includes several major mobile website operations, including Target and Walmart along with Forever 21 and Lululemon, just for starters. It’s just a mobile thing, for right now, though; those using Venmo through a desktop application are going to have to wait a bit, though some suggest that feature will be coming at some point.

Venmo and PayPal are pretty well joined at the hip on this one; those interested in using Pay With Venmo will have to click on the PayPal button to even see the Venmo payment option to begin with. From there, at last report, users will still have the option to show off purchases made. The transactions will be kept private by default, though, so those wanting to share will have to enable such activity directly.

Potentially, this could be a big way to address one of the big problems of mobile shopping: the tedious practice of trying to manually input billing and shipping information into devices best meant for short messages. That’s always been something of a trade-off kind of situation; do you go through the hassle of manual input every time or do you run some not-insignificant hacking risk to get your billing and shipping information stolen from the device on which you kept it?

With Venmo’s plan, that may not be such a problem any more. Only time will tell just how well it works, but piggybacking on the PayPal network might be just the stroke that Venmo needed to make a full B2C press.