PayPal adds new retailers for in-store payments

Company also announces deal with Jamba Juice to allow customers to pre-order via mobile

After partnering with 16 national retailers in May of last year, which allowed customers to pay for their items with their PayPal account in-store, the company set itself a goal of having partnerships with 20 retailers by the end of 2012.

Not only was PayPal was able to meet that goal, it actually passed it, and it how has relationships with a total of 23 retailers, it was announced Monday.

The seven new retailers include Famous Footwear, Dollar General, Mapco Express, RadioShack, Spartan Stores and two additional partners that PayPal will soon share with the public. These retailers are joining the other 16 national retailers that PayPal was already partnered with: Abercrombie & Fitch, Advance Auto Parts, Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Guitar Center, the Home Depot, Jamba Juice, JC Penney, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Nine West, Office Depot, Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct and Toys “R” Us.

The way that it in-store payments work is that customers are able to use either a PIN code, or a special PayPal credit card that they swipe, which will automatically deduct the payment directly from the customer's PayPal account. With these 23 partnerships, PayPal says that customers can checkout with the service in over 18,000 brick and mortar retail stores all over the country.

“Delivering valuable digital and mobile payments is alive and thriving, and consumers all over the U.S. will now start seeing PayPal more where they shop every day, including the grocery store and at the gas pump,” Don Kingsborough, VP, Retail Services at PayPal, wrote.

“We believe that by bringing value to the checkout experience ‘every day’ with proven technology that is simple, fast, and secure and offering true benefits such as coupons, rewards and loyalty, we’ve uncovered a winning solution when people pay.  No bells, whistles or buzzes – just technology that works and gets the most from your money.”

In addition to teaming up with these retailers, PayPal also announced in August that it had struck a deal with Discover to gain access to Discover’s network of seven million merchants in the second quarter of 2013, though customers will still have to pay with the PayPal card.

Pre-ordering via mobile

In addition to announcing that it was bringing in-store payments to these new retailers, PayPal has also announced Monday that it has struck a deal with Jamba Juice that will allow customers to pre-order their smoothies on their iPhone. 

The first location to use the service is located in Emeryville, California. 

PayPal struck a similar deal with McDonalds in August 2012, when it was announced that PayPal was teaming up with McDonalds to allow customer to order food via a McDonald's app on their smart phones and pay with PayPal -- then consumers can go straight to a designated line to just pick up their order. McDonald's began testing the system in 30 of its restaurants in France.

Competition

Mobile payments are a hot commodity these days. A report in early 2012 found that a vast majority, around 65%, of experts agreed that Smartphone payments would be mainstream by the end of this decade. 

The biggest name in the space is probably Square, which uses an a square shaped dongle that allows users in the United States to accept credit cards through their iOS and Android mobile phones by swiping their credit card on the Square device. The device mobilized, digitalized, and simplified credit card transactions.

in August, Square struck a deal with Starbucks, which allowed Square payments in 7,000 Starbucks locations around the United States.

Groupon has also gotten into the mobile payments game, debuting Groupon Payments in September. The payments system is built right into the Groupon Merchants app, means a merchant can swipe a card and do a transaction while also redeeming deals and updating their analytics to note how many deals have been redeemed, what the average bill looks like, and how much has been spent altogether.

Check out this video PayPal released about the Jamba Juice deal:

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