Fifteen major national retailers will enable consumers to make payments via PayPal at checkout counters inside bricks-and-mortar locations, PayPal announced today. Earlier this year, The Home Depot Inc. became the first major chain to enable such payments.
“Consumers are relying on technology now more than ever to simplify their lives when it comes to shopping and paying, and retailers must adapt to this shift or risk becoming irrelevant,” says David Marcus, president of PayPal, which is owned by eBay Inc.
Consumers who want to pay for purchases via PayPal have two options. The shopper can pay by entering his phone number and a personal identification number into a point-of-sale terminal. The telephone number would have to be previously associated with his PayPal account. A consumer also can swipe a PayPal-issued card tied to her PayPal account.
Today’s announcement says that the following retailers will accept the PayPal payments; the numbers that follow are the retailers’ ranks in the 2012 Top 500 Guide, where applicable:
• Abercrombie & Fitch Co., 45
• Advance Auto Parts Inc., 385
• Aéropostale Inc., 114
• American Eagle Outfitters Inc., 65
• Barnes & Noble, 32
• Foot Locker Inc., 54
• Guitar Center, 44 (Musician’s Friend Inc.)
• Jamba Juice
• JC Penney Co. Inc., 20
• Jos. A. Bank Clothiers Inc., 207
• Nine West, 155 (Jones Retail Corp.)
• Office Depot Inc., 6
• Rooms To Go Inc., 260
• Tiger Direct, 25 (Systemax Inc.)
• Toys ‘R’ Us Inc., 29
PayPal did not say when the stores would start accepting PayPal. The Home Depot needed approximately two months to move from a test involving five stores to a national rollout at 2,000 locations.
The effort to put PayPal into more stores also involves two new deals with makers of point-of-sale terminals to enable their machines to process PayPal payments: Verifone Systems Inc. and Equinox Payments LLC, which used to be Hypercom Corp. Marcus says PayPal has a previous deal with Ingenico SA.
PayPal’s attempt to capture more bricks-and-mortar transactions goes beyond the 15 chains announced today. Marcus says the payments service has reached deals with point-of-sale software providers that serve a total of 50,000 smaller retail businesses in the United States. Those software providers are Leapset, ShopKeep POS, Vend and Erply. Nearly 2,000 merchants, for instance, use ShopKeep for point-of-sale technology, which enables merchants to process transactions via iPads.
“Disruptive, innovative point-of-sale providers like ShopKeep are helping us to work with thousands of small businesses to accept PayPal in-store,” says Hill Ferguson, vice president of mobile, PayPal. “ShopKeep’s cloud-based solution enables small businesses to seamlessly add PayPal as a payment option into their existing point-of-sale systems without having to upgrade their hardware.”
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