Samsung Pay, PayPal Make Increasing Push on In-Store Mobile Payments

Shopping from a smartphone is, for many, almost second-nature these days. Sitting in traffic? A doctor’s office? Anywhere else you have to wait? Pull out that smartphone, hit up your mobile site of choice and start impulse buying. It’s a smooth and easy experience, and mobile payments helps make that happen. Translating it to the brick-and-mortar store, however, is proving much less easy, and a deal between Samsung Pay and PayPal may help.

Samsung Pay’s use of the near-field communications (NFC) wallet technology has been a big step forward on this front, as popularized by its ads featuring Hannibal Buress at New York institution Katz’s Deli. Basically, Samsung Pay could demonstrate that its wallet system would be accepted just about anywhere that could take NFC card operations, which included a lot of places that Apple Pay wasn’t accepted.

Just within the last couple days, Samsung Pay actually ramped the process up further. A partnership deal between Samsung Pay and PayPal inked last July launched for certain users, allowing PayPal to be an option in Samsung Pay and effectively giving users the option of using their PayPal balances to pay for things in stores. Better yet, those who use PayPal with Samsung Pay will be able to get Samsung Rewards, which allow users to either get gift cards for certain stores or to pay for purchases in the Samsung online store.

This will likely prove a welcome development for PayPal users, whose options were kind of limited previously as far as using their balances. While “transfer to a bank” and “get a check / prepaid card in the mail” were options, that likely didn’t sit well with folks at the gas station who had cash, just not immediately accessible. Some efforts to bring PayPal to the real world had happened previously, but they never really caught on. The idea of PayPal tied directly into Samsung Pay, which has already been proven to work in a host of places, is likely to work out well.

With PayPal still trying to find ways to make up for the upcoming eBay shortfall, “getting into more physical stores” is likely to provide one such way. A great move for both PayPal and Samsung, this should allow for more payments, more processing, and more profitability all around.