PayPal Stories Archive

In a major step forward in the evolution of Venmo, we are pleased to announce that starting this week, Venmo customers can use their Venmo account to shop and make purchases on their mobile phone at more than two million U.S. retailers, almost everywhere PayPal is accepted.

 

Venmo is a leading mobile app that has changed the way whole generations think about money by making payments between friends a fun, social experience. Venmo has a loyal following of highly-engaged customers and they have been asking us for more ways to use Venmo in their daily lives. Since early last year, we’ve been slowly introducing the ability to pay select businesses with Venmo. We started with in-app purchases with a curated list of merchants through the Braintree platform.

 

Now, we're dramatically expanding the number of places you can use Venmo to pay by leveraging the unrivaled scale of the PayPal merchant network.

 

For merchants, the ability to offer Venmo as a payment option at checkout is very appealing. With Venmo, merchants can reach a new audience of shoppers, many whom skew millennial and engage with Venmo multiple times throughout the day. And the Venmo social feed represents an entirely new way for merchants to increase awareness and open new purchase opportunities. We’re seeing in some instances that the appeal of Venmo has prompted some of the largest and most influential U.S. merchants to expand existing or begin new processing relationships with PayPal.

 

Today’s news is a true testament to the power of the PayPal platform and demonstrates the unique value that PayPal can bring to retailers. The investments we’ve made in our platform architecture allow us to enable Venmo as a payment method for millions of PayPal merchants at one time without any additional integration work on the merchant’s part, mirroring the approach we used to successfully launch One Touch.

 

We’re also expanding the ways that merchants can accept Venmo on the Braintree platform with the introduction of mobile web payment support. Now Braintree merchants can offer Venmo as a payment option both in-app and on mobile web. And as part of our continuous innovation, we’re testing the ability for merchants to offer dynamically-painted payment buttons, which will show Venmo customers a custom dual-branded button that allows selection between PayPal or Venmo payment options.

 

Our vision for Venmo is to not only be the go-to app for payments between friends, but also a ubiquitous digital wallet that helps consumers spend wherever and however they want to pay, regardless of device. Through 2017 and beyond, we will continue to evolve the payments experience that has helped make Venmo a cultural staple, while also applying that same magic to split, share and pay in new ways. And we’ll continue to innovate on behalf of our merchant customers to provide ways to engage Venmo customers to drive more sales.