Facebook users will soon be able to link their PayPal account to Facebook and Facebook Messenger to buy a movie ticket, order a pizza, or book a hair appointment, all on their mobile device without leaving the app.
The new feature, rolling out to some U.S. users, eventually will be available to all of Facebook and Facebook Messenger users who have PayPal accounts.
Facebook has 1.57 billion mobile monthly active users and Facebook Messenger has more than 1 billion monthly active users. PayPal has 177 million active consumer accounts.
By 2017, mobile commerce revenue will make up 50 percent of U.S. digital commerce revenue, Gartner has predicted. That shift will be driven by the way consumers interact with their mobile devices, the firm found.
Thirty percent of PayPal’s transactions now go through mobile, said Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s head of global initiatives. With this new service, PayPal hopes to capture an even greater slice of the growing e-commerce payments business and to keep its 15 million merchant customers happy. Merchants will also be able to send users receipts via the Messenger app.
“This is about allowing you to conduct commerce whenever you want to be doing it,” said Nayar. “As more and more of your life goes through the mobile environment, the idea of going to your desktop or laptop for commerce is going away.”
PayPal Senior Vice President Bill Ready will take the stage at the Money 20/20 conference at 3 p.m. PT to talk about PayPal’s vision to remove the friction form mobile payments.
For Facebook, anything that keeps people using its apps is good for business. The new capabilities build on an existing partnership between PayPal’s Braintree Facebook and Uber, which allowed customers to hail and pay for an Uber within Messenger. Though Facebook is not yet making any real revenue from Messenger, the company sees the potential.
“We’re very pleased that PayPal is now starting to offer its customers an easy way to link their accounts to Facebook and Messenger commerce experiences, as well as enabling easy management of their PayPal receipts right in Messenger,” Stan Chudnovsky, Messenger’s head of product, said via email.
Expect to be able to do even more shopping in Messenger soon. Facebook has opened up the Facebook Messenger platform in beta so that other developers can work on integrating payments into their bots.There are now more than 33,000 bots on Messenger, and that number is growing, David Marcus, the company’s vice president of messaging products, told CNBC in September.
source”cnbc”
