More shoppers are using PayPal Holdings Inc.’s payment tools, and they’re doing so more often.
Total payment volume, which refers to the overall dollar value of payments processed through PayPal’s platform, in the second quarter ended June 30 grew by 23.5% to $106.444 billion, up from $86.208 billion during the same time last year,PayPal reported Wednesday.
Fueling that growth is the growing number of consumers using their PayPal accounts and using them more frequently. PayPal reported that it had 210 million active customer accounts, which PayPal defines as an account that has either sent or received a payment through its platform in the past year, in the quarter, up 11.7% from 188 million in Q2 2016. PayPal averaged 32.3 payment transactions per active account, up 22.6% from 29.4 last year.
PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman attributes the company’s success during the quarter to mobile payments, which grew by 50% year over year to $36 billion in payment volume, or 34% of the company’s total payment volume in Q2.
“This growth is largely driven by the exceptional and differentiated consumer experiences we enabled on mobile devices,” he told analysts on the call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “One Touch adoption continued to expand in the quarter with over 60 million consumer accounts opted in.” One Touch is a feature that allows mobile shoppers to stay logged in on their mobile devices, reducing friction when it comes to checkout because shoppers don’t have to re-enter their payment information to complete a purchase if a merchant accepts PayPal. PayPal rolled out the feature last June.
Venmo, PayPal’s mobile peer-to-peer payments platform, also is becoming more popular. PayPal reported that payments processed through Venmo grew by 103% year over year during the quarter to $8.0 billion. As more merchants begin to accept Venmo as a payment option, PayPal said it expects that figure to continue to grow.
“Users are now able to use Venmo at an expanded number of PayPal merchants, such as lululemon (No. 83 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 500) and Forever 21 (No. 247) and I’m quite encouraged by the early results,” Schulman said. “We expect that the ability to pay with Venmo will be widely deployed across millions of our PayPal merchants by the end of this year.”
Analysts say they’re encouraged by the strides PayPal made during the quarter.
“PayPal announced solid Q2 results, with impressive growth across most key metrics, reflecting promising trends in user growth and engagement as well as improving execution and disciplined cost controls,” writes Colin Sebastian, senior research analyst at Robert W. Baird. “With a number of PayPal’s strategic partnerships already beginning to gain traction, we still anticipate further upside opportunities in international expansion of the customer choice initiative, Venmo monetization and asset-light credit strategies, all of which remain on track per management commentary.”
Part of total payment volume is the dollar value of transactions PayPal processes on behalf of online merchants, including credit and debit card payments as well as PayPal purchases. PayPal is the payment processing vendor for 459 retailers in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000, which generated a combined $22.482 billion in online sales in 2016, according to Top500Guide.com.
For the second quarter ended June 30, PayPal reports:
- Net revenue of $3.136 billion, up 18.3% from $2.650 billion during the same time last year.
- 1.775 billion payment transactions, up 22.6% from 1.448 billion.
- U.S. net revenue of $1.690 billion, up 20.1% from $1.407 billion.
- Transaction revenues, which are fees PayPal charges consumers and merchants based on the volume of activity processed through its platform, of $2.749 billion, up 18.3% from $2.323 billion.
- Net income of $411 million, up 27.2% from $323 million.
For the first six months of 2017, PayPal reports:
- Net revenue of $6.111 billion, up 17.7% from $5.194 billion last year.
- Net income of $795 million, up 15.6% from $688 million.