PayPal greetings cards feature added to the app

PayPal continues to develop their person to person payments service when it comes to ending money between friends and family. Or as they term it the digital gifting experience. It could be sending some cash as a thank you, for a birthday or paying your share of dinner. But it seems that the trend for sending small sums between friends is a teen on the up. And now you can use a PayPal greetings card when send cash to friends.

Senior Director of Consumer Marketing Dhiraj Kumar says: “a recent PayPal study found that 84% of Americans have repaid a friend or family member for something they owed. On average, Americans pay friends back almost 35 times a year, to the tune of almost $5,000 per year in total.”

To improve the experience of sending a gift or reimbursing a chum, PayPal has added a cute selection of greetings cards that the sender can use to mollify the experience and personalise the message. The templates are available to money senders using the app. PayPal explores their reasoning in rather syrupy terms on their blog here.

Whilst this might seem like a frivolous little feature and of little use to ecommerce and marketplace sellers it does have a some serious aspects at its core. One of the problems and markets that PayPal needs to keep in with and encourage are the millennials. Anecdotally, I find that younger people aren’t as likely to use PayPal as people my own age.

Needless to say, PayPal was developed in a pre-smartphone age and was originally a website rather than an app. And now they are competing with app native payments apps that have a bit more cool. The most obvious one to mention is Venmo which is most popular among teens and twenty somethings. Quirky things like these PayPal greetings cards go someway to soften the PayPal payments experience.