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A new way of shopping using the PayPal app and related services is in the offing.
Announced Thursday, the update includes a one-click guest checkout experience, digital receipts PayPal calls Smart Receipts, a revised offers platform, and improvements to business profiles for Venmo, its social peer-to-peer payments service.
The moves come as PayPal Holdings Inc. chief executive Alex Chriss works on his goal of “future-proofing” PayPal. Its stock price has slumped from a year-ago high $79.10 to $60.75 Thursday.
First up is Fastlane, a new guest-checkout process that enables consumers to one-click checkout without setting up a separate account with a merchant. Much like the upcoming Paze service from Early Warning Services LLC, Fastlane will store a consumer’s information, such as payment choices and shipping and billing addresses. It is in testing now. Some merchants using the BigCommerce e-commerce platform have reported that Fastlane can recognize 70% of guest and checkout speeds up to 40% quicker than without Fastlane, PayPal says.
Fastlane could, indeed, boost PayPal’s e-commerce presence, observers says.
“PayPal announced a number of notable features and improvements, but Fastlane by PayPal is the most consequential by far,” Daniel Keyes, senior analyst, merchant services, at Javelin Strategy & Research, tells Digital Transactions News. “Checkout is at the core of PayPal’s identity, and if Fastlane is able to create a quick and frictionless experience that consumers like, it will help PayPal fend off the numerous competing digital wallets that have their own speedy checkout products. Otherwise, PayPal risks losing consumers to other digital wallets, and, over time, merchants will grow less interested in PayPal if it their customers would prefer other wallets.”
PayPal, with nearly 400 million consumer accounts and 35 million merchant accounts, is wise to tap into the available purchase data.
“It makes sense for a customer to be able to use the information that PayPal has on file to minimize or eliminate the hassle of data entry for a purchase at a new merchant site,” says Thad Peterson, strategic advisor at Datos Insights. “For merchants, it should create opportunities to make sales that they otherwise would not have gotten because of the friction involved in a guest transaction.”
PayPal also is launching Smart Receipts, which enables consumers shopping with PayPal to track their purchases and receive personalized recommendations, with the assistance of artificial intelligence. They also get a cashback reward offer. PayPal says that, globally, 45% of its customers open their email receipts daily.
“This increases the opportunities for merchants to re-engage directly with their customers, increasing the probability of repeat shopping and business growth,” PayPal says.
“What’s especially cool about these AI-powered suggestions is that we’re doing something new at incredible scale,” Chriss says in a presentation released on YouTube. “For businesses, our suggestions are based on what we know about your shoppers and their broader shopping habits. Not just at your store, but through the scale of PayPal we can also see across the Web.”
An updated offers platform also is part of PayPal’s revamp, which launches in steps this year in the United States and then globally, the company says. This platform will provide merchants the ability to create offers based on a variety of factors, including stock-keeping units and individual products, PayPal says. The new platform also can use artificial intelligence to organize and analyze data from PayPal transactions made globally. Merchants will only pay for performance, not impressions or clicks, PayPal says.
The PayPal app is receiving an update with CashPass, a way for consumers to receive cash-back offers. “A user will simply need to tap on the offer, shop at that business, and check out with PayPal. CashPass uses AI to organize personalized offers for customers based on shopping behaviors, and customers will regularly discover new cash back offers giving them more reasons to visit the app,” PayPal says. It is expected to launch in March with Best Buy, eBay, McDonald’s, Priceline, Ticketmaster, Uber, and Walmart as initial merchants.
PayPal also is trying to spur more commercial activity with its Venmo peer-to-peer payments app. Having introduced Venmo business profiles in 2021, PayPal is tweaking them now with the addition of subscribe buttons, profile rankings, and the ability to offer promotions.
