PayPal have announced that 15 major US high street retailers are going to adopt PayPal offline payment solutions across the States. The participating retailers are: Abercrombie & Fitch, Advance Auto Parts, Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Guitar Center, Jamba Juice, JC Penney, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Nine West, Office Depot, Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct and Toys “R” Us.
PayPal are aiming to make it easy for retailers to adopt their payment offerings. Their first retailer, The Home Depot, went from a five store pilot test to a full rollout to almost 2,000 locations in just two months. With PayPal, retailers don’t need to rip and replace existing payment terminals, install NFC or conduct a massive upgrade. PayPal works seamlessly with a retailer’s existing point of sale hardware. That’s a major selling point and one of the reasons that Google Wallet has pretty much stalled.
Google Wallet currently only works on the Nexus S 4G mobile with a Sprint being the only mobile carrier and only if you also have a Citi PayPass eligible MasterCard. In other words you’re almost certainly not going to be able to use it. PayPal however aims to enable you to pay with nothing bar a mobile phone at most with funding from any bank or credit card you care to use.
PayPal have also announced relationships with point of sale software providers Leapset, ShopKeep, Vend and Erply to help their retailer customers take advantage of the new technologies while integrating into their existing systems.
These companies already work with 50,000 mid-market US businesses offline. With the flip of a switch, their merchants could use PayPal in their stores without ripping out and replacing their existing systems and investing in new or expensive upgrades. Starting today some of their merchants are live with PayPal’s local feature in their stores so customers can alert merchant that they’re in-store, and get what PayPal call the “VIP” treatment while paying with the best possible user experience.
For retailers who are going to upgrade their point of sale terminals PayPal are also working with Ingenico, VeriFone and Equinox to integrate PayPal functionality into their payment terminals. With these deals in place, PayPal now has access to nearly 40 million payment terminals worldwide to help us drive innovation at scale.
There’s a long way to go before you’re paying for your groceries at Asda with PayPal, but perhaps a shorter wait than if you want to pay with alternative digital wallet providers who are racing to catch up.
One Response
It should be interesting to see how this works for them and if other retailers will use Paypal