PayPal’s instant checkout service called OneTouch is now being extended to support all merchants using the e-commerce platform Bigcommerce, as well as on mobile devices – even in cases where the consumer doesn’t have the PayPal native application installed. The service, which allows customers to check out from an online merchant without having to enter their username and password, launched publicly last fall on mobile devices then expanded to the web in April.
The news of its expansion to Bigcommerce and elsewhere was one of several announcements made at an event today in San Francisco today where PayPal detailed its strategy as an independent, public company.
One Touch was originally designed to improve the conversion rates for online transactions. On mobile in particular, consumers tend to abandon purchases simply because of the challenges associated with entering in their personal information payment card details on mobile’s small screen. PayPal’s move to counter this trend was OneTouch for Mobile, which allows a customer’s information to be stored and shared between supported apps.
That means that customers would only have to enter their PayPal credentials for their first mobile purchase, but subsequent purchases could be made with just one tap. The system is currently being used by a number of merchants including Jane.com, ParkWhiz, StubHub, Threadless, Airbnb, Lyft and Munchery, for example.
In April, PayPal announced that it would offer similar functionality to web-based merchants as well, which meant the product now had the potential to reach PayPal’s 165 million customers.
Today, PayPal is extending OneTouch again through a partnership with Bigcommmerce, a company powering the e-commerce storefronts used by 90,000 online merchants. With the added support, these merchants will now be able to offer OneTouch functionality to their own customers via Braintree’s v.zero SDK. (Braintree was acquired by PayPal in 2013, and now its technology helps power the OneTouch integrations).
Additionally, the company has today linked its web and mobile experiences for OneTouch, which means that consumers can make purchases on mobile devices – including via native mobile applications – even if they don’t have the PayPal app installed on their smartphone or tablet. Instead, all they’ll have to do is sign in once with their PayPal credentials via the web or another mobile app in order to use OneTouch.
The company claims that by reducing the friction typically associated with mobile checkout, some of its merchants have seen their conversions increase by 50 percent or greater.
OneTouch, though still relatively new, demonstrates PayPal’s effort to maintain a top position as a payment provider in today’s increasingly mobile age. It offers merchants a way to combat Amazon’s ease-of-use, which comes from its proprietary one-click checkout.
Despite being an older player in the ever-changing payments industry where newer contenders including Stripe, and now Apple Pay, are finding their ways into mobile apps and online stores, PayPal’s payments business is still growing. The company reported its net total payment volume rose 18 percent to $61 billion, it said in April, and it added 3.6 million new accounts in the quarter.
The company says that today, online and mobile shopping accounts for $2.5 trillion in annual retail sales, and PayPal processes nearly 12.5 million payments for its customers daily. The move towards digital payments over physical payments is also a factor in PayPal’s growth. It notes that a couple of years ago, half of transactions involved checks or cash, but in a couple years’ time, they’ll account for only 25 percent of transactions.
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