One of the key challenges to frictionless mobile and web payments is being able to carry your digital wallet across platforms and websites, including your credit cards, shipping and billing information. Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), PayPal, and others are all trying to help solve this problem. Last year, PayPal allowed for “one-touch” payments on phones running Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems. With it, you need only log in once with PayPal to pay for goods across different mobile apps.
On Tuesday, PayPal (EBAY) extends this capability to web, allowing customers to pay for goods across the millions of websites that accept PayPal with only a single log in. Here’s how it works: if you log in to an e-commerce site and use PayPal, you’ll be prompted to enter your username and password to use your credit or debit cards on file. After that log in, any other attempt to purchase an item on the web using PayPal will proceed with only a one-click confirmation of the purchase.
Because users don’t have to keep re-logging in, they end up spending more, PayPal says. PayPal users who went through OneTouch experience on Lyft converted more frequently than those who went through the traditional PayPal experience. StubHub, the eBay-owned ticket marketplace, reported a double digit increase in sales.
In eBay’s Q1 earnings call last week, PayPal CEO-in-waiting Dan Schulman alluded to new features being added to the company’s digital wallet strategy.
All signs point to PayPal having an healthy future as an independent company, as the payments giant prepares to spin-off from parent company eBay. In the first quarter of 2015, PayPal saw payment volume rise 18% to $61 billion, with the number of transactions using PayPal growing 24% to over 1 billion. Mobile, is a key growth area, with payments through PayPal on phones up 40% year-over-year. In fact, mobile payments now represent 30% of all PayPal transactions.
Despite mobile commerce growth, payments made on the web still makes up for the majority of e-commerce, PayPal Senior Vice President, Global Head of Merchant and Next-Generation Commerce, Bill Ready explains. Which, he adds, is why launching one-touch payments for websites is such a huge opportunity.