It’s a pretty common thing to see in an online store: pay with PayPal, but what about on mobile devices? Well, the eBay-owned company is working on that. The company just announced PayPal One Touch, a new system that hopes to make paying of items in mobile apps a one-touch affair. The feature isn’t an app itself, but rather a service that can be embedded in other apps. Users will log into their PayPal account one time, and subsequently be able to pay for products in supported apps with a single click.
Mobile commerce today is still challenging with complicated checkout flows that see users bouncing between screens, and having to tap out their personal information on tiny screens and keyboards. PayPal today is hoping to change that with the release of a new product called One Touch for merchants and app developers. The feature was built in collaboration with PayPal acquisition Braintree, and is basically like a PayPal version of Braintree’s Venmo Touch product. For those unfamiliar with Venmo, it was an early-stage mobile payments startup Braintree acquired in 2012, before being bought itself by PayPal last year. Venmo offers a social appthat makes it easy for users to quickly send money to each other, then cash out to a bank overnight. Venmo Touch, meanwhile, was introduced as a way for mobile app users to access their stored payment information across a network of Braintree-supported apps, like HotelTonight, Airbnb and Uber, for example.
