PayPal has launched its mobile payment platform, called, of course, PayPal Mobile. Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch had the scoop and was also slashdotted an hour ago.
This spells trouble for existing mobile payment provider TextPayMe. PayPal’s solution is fully baked, easy to use, and has some great features that take this beyond a way to text your friends money.
To use the service, click here and sign in (you must have or create a PayPal account to view this). You need to register a phone and create a PIN. PayPal uses an automated system to call you on the phone and verify the PIN, and the phone is then usable.
To send a person to person payment, you either text the payment amount and recipient’s phone number to PayPal, or call a toll free number and follow the directions.
PayPal Mobile can also be used to pay for stuff as well. It’s called Text to Buy:
Anytime you see Text to Buy next to something you want to buy—on a poster, in a magazine, at an event—you can securely order the item by text message.
Use your phone to buy items like CDs, DVDs, books, electronics, accessories and much more.
To use it, you text PayPal the item number, and they call you back to confirm the purchase. Done.
I’ve confirmed that there are no additional charges for using PayPal Mobile. If you have a business or premium account, normal fees to receive money apply. And, of course, most mobile carriers charge for text messages.
Wow. First Mobile product I really see worth using today. Looks really well implemented.
The original Paypal was a mobile solution designed to send payments on Palm devices. Mobile payment systems are quite popular in Europe and especially in Asia. It will be very interesting to see how this product tapes shape and if this industry(mobile payments)as a whole will sprout in the U.S. I have no reason to believe that it will not. Ebay…through paypal, definately has the user base to promote this new service to and to scale it up quickly.
So wait, is this an actual payment processor for the phone, or is this just another text messaging payment service? For example, could I use it to “instantly buy” something through my cellular phone, like if I was at an e-commerce site? Or would I have to go through the hassle of logging off of my mobile browser and then text messaging?
I definitely like it for real world payments though — like paying someone at a garage sale through your phone…
It always amazes me how Mastercard and Visa missed this boat. It’s a big potential market for them.
Very very cool. One question i have that is not addressed on the site. When you Pay someone via a text message using their phone number…. Does it have to be a mobile number or any phone number? Can it be a land line registered with PayPal?
this is even better than awesome. i hope businesses start accepting this soon.
if i had owned a restaraunt and wanted to be cool, i’d start accepting paypal mobile. people could come in, eat, and when the bill came, it would be paid in seconds. simple. easy. awesome.
hopefully, america will be soon be able to match the technological sophistication of some of our eastern friends.
Awesome, more and more reasons why I love PayPal.
I can’t wait until I see an ad that has “Text to Buy” using PayPal on it.
when texting a phone or calling toll free, how do they confirm that it’s actually you calling/texting… isn’t caller-id easy to forge? my understanding is that the originating phone number sent with the call can be made up on the fly (it’s a feature!)…
you mentioned that on text-to-buy they call you back to confirm, but they don’t also confirm when sending payment view text or toll free?
am i missing something?
Another win for shippers and freihjt forwarders from the pypal News.
I can’t figure out if this is a US only service or if it will work for example in Sweden where I live. Does anyone here know?
Unfortunately does not cover Europe.
“Only US, Canadian, and UK users can activate phones for mobile payments.”
If Paypal moves at Google speed to include European coverage, I’ll be waiting for quite some time… hope not.
Yes, this is a great improvement to paypal way of doing things.
but then again as said “This phone number cannot be activated for PayPal mobile. Only US, Canadian, and UK users can activate phones for mobile payments.”
So far I’ve only been able to find a few services that cover several countries.
mEnable is one of them, but they charge you 40% commision on every transaction + a monthly fee + setup costs.
http://www.m-en...le.com/content/
Anyone know of other services with broad coverage?
here’s a link to a year old story about spoofing caller-id numbers.
http://blogs.wa...phones_lie.html
i’m not saying paypal mobile’s not a great idea, i just want to make sure that i’m the only one who can pay with my money…
I must be missing something here, but this seems like nothing but a hassle to me. First, how does the person/business verify that they received my payment? Second, what happens if someone gets a hold of my phone and goes on a papyal spending rampage? Third, I don’t know about you guys, but it’s a hell of a lot easier for me to click a few buttons on their website or whip out my visa than it is using my phone to send a text message. Unimpressed.
It’s also not clear whether I can use PayPal Mobile to pay for what I mostly consume on my phone: mobile content. Do I really need to get out of my WAP browser (or bluepulse widget) and go send an SMS, then wait for the IVR callback, just to download a ringtone? Seems like carrier billing is still uncontested there.
And in the paying-restaurant-bill scenario, how long after I do my SMS-IVR thing does the waitperson serving my table get confirmation that my bill’s been paid and I should be allowed to leave? Because if the manager’s got to log in to PayPal on the PC in the office, or wait around for an SMS confirmation to come through, maybe I’ll just keep paying with my credit card for the time-being.
how do they confirm that it’s actually you calling/texting… isn’t caller-id easy to forge?
What probably goes on is that they send a WAP push to your phone saying “click here to buy X for $Y” and when you do they send a P-SMS (premium SMS) that ends up on your phone bill.
The trouble with setting up a P-SMS billing is that those companies eat up 40% (!) of the *revenue* of the bill. So there’s not much money to be made in this space right now.
It might change with the purchasing power of eBay.
Michael (and others),
What’s your take on this technology with regards to the classified ads industry? I concur with certain issues raised regarding the use of charge cards versus PayPay Mobile, but, people selling items via classified ads generally don’t have a merchant account to accept charge cards and potential buyers may not want to carry large sums of money, or may not want to make an additional trip to the bank/atm to acquire funds prior to checking an item at someone’s premises. Also, sellers are generally reluctant to accept personal checks from buyers. As someone pointed out earlier, this could be useful to buyers/sellers participating in garage sales. I see this technology spilling over into the classified ads industry in a very positive way (especially if frequent flyer miles are involved down the road). May have a negative impact on Ebay and freight companies with regards to local purchases via online classified ads.
Very interesting,
Not only Mastercard and Visa missed that train but also Mobile operators who will only charge the price of a normal SMS.
UK and European users are covered in this area by a British start-up called Mobile Sense (http://www.mobile-sense.com/). They’ve had a working system up for over half a year, built by strong team which spun out from Orange.
SMS do not use caller ID, so, spoofing is not applicable to SMS.
Very soon our cell phones will be our wallets. Nobody’s surprised that Japan leads this trend again – have you heard of Sony’s FeliCa?
In the payments area in the US, the two companies I like and monitor are “Pay By Touch”:http://www.paybytouch.com/ and “PayWi”:http://www.paywi.com/.
I would be very interested in learning from responsible journalists, whether another company owns some IP around the call back security functionality. Call it the skeptical lawyer in me. Seems PayPal ripped off TextPayMe directly not only with this unique feature, but also with the UI. I bet with a lot of certainty that you will find some interesting IP issues here that are potentially dangerous to eBay.
Mike! The link for TextPayMe is incorrect.
I bet that within 6 months Google will launch Google Mobile Payments!
did not give good instruction for a new user like me turning txt msg on,actv phone, trying to txt the infor and not know exactly what to do i sent it twice and i know it is wrong plus i need a 2x shirt(not twiggy size)not listed in example??
I got 5 on it has never been easier before !!!
It will definitely catch on soon with teenagers and then a large wave of users
Yes, it appears you can activate on a land line as well.
Their answer to the “caller ID” problem: don’t make use of it at all. When they call you and ask you to log in, the system greets you by name FIRST (puts your first name through text-to-speech).
ONE BIG PROBLEM.
This system doesn’t change the policies and procedures surrounding how PayPal actually delivers money- and there’s a couple big inconveniences- to be more specific- DELAYS.
If I pay you with via PayPal (mobile or traditional) and I have the funds come out of my checking account, you will have to wait 4 DAYS or so for those funds to be available in your PayPal account- more if you want to then transfer them into your own back account.
Should I choose to have the funds pulled from my credit card- you have to upgrade to a Premium/Business Account and pay 2.9% to receive the funds.
I tried having my roommates pay me their share of the utilities with PayPal, but it was a week before I would have the money.
No good.
I don’t understand. This is what Paypal was before eBay bought them. This is what it was when it first started. This isn’t a NEW INVENTION on their part. The only difference is the Text To Buy part and they used Palm Pilots before.
That is quite old. In Germany there was a company already in 1998 that has provided tha same service called paybox.
I would guess that they simply text message you a link and you then login to your paypal and hit make payment for order # xyz and within seconds your order is paid. Only thing now is SECURITY!!! This sounds great but like all technology that involves money, there is always a criminal one-step ahead figuring out how they can get at the cash.
I already know a trick on that but can’t go into details since I have an important meeting tommorow at the same restraunt bill gates is eating at
And PayPal will skim their 5% or more from what goes through them. Nice idea but they always take too high a percentage.
Amanda, clearly you’ve never operated a business with credit card capabilities, because 5% is actually quite acceptable.
Thats pretty sweet. No more “I’ll pay you later” from someone who doesn’t usually. Now you can just say, “text me”.
This “new” form of paying makes it very difficult to pay for eBay auctions from your phone- and paying for eBay is PayPal’s bread and butter. You used to be able to log on to http://www.paypal.com from your phone’s browser, and it would allow you to pull up your won auctions, as if you were logged on by PC. With the advent of this “new and better” service, they’ve eliminated thier WAP site. IT SUCKS.
Tea Vui Huang’s
SMS Front-end Menu for PayPal Mobile
To use PayPal Mobile via text message, a user will need to memorize a list of command codes and the sequence & format of how each payment detail should be arranged. Some services even have different SMS numbers to send the information to! Aside from the inconvenience, it is also easy to make mistakes – akin to a three-fingered alien making typos when writing out a check!
The solution is to have a user-friendly menu (or ‘wizards’ for the PC-inclined) to query and process the data, then format it into the pre-requsite order before sending it out to the PayPal Mobile server. This frees the user from having to memorize cryptic codes and reduces the occurance of human errors in manually composing the modern age equivalent of Telegraphic messages!
http://teavuihu...om/paypalmobile
Hey everyone,
If you haven’t tried the service yet, you should. Its great, all the secutity issues are in place. Their text to buy stuff is what I’m really keen on. Does anybody know who doing the sms technology/messaging service on it?
Thanks,
Ak
Hey Saul, MC Visa AmEx Discover are too busy suing each other to care about the future of payments. Knock the dot com bubble all you want but the companies of that era are leaving their rivals in the dust!
I don’t think you could use it to recieve a credit card payment – you’ve got to already be signed up.
So pretty useless until it gains critical mass
Could not agree more with the comment about taking down their website for this. I am on my berry *only* this weekend and can not send payments for ebay auctions that I have won on ebay. This is a step back. /Josh
PAYPAL WILL DESTROY YOUR SMALL BUSINESS
HTTP://WWW.NO-PAYPAL.COM
It’s the pre-meditation required that will limit this programs’ participation. If I could accept a credit card payment from my mobile phone, that would be useful. The chance of running across a customer who has Paypal Mobile activated already is remote. Not to mention, Paypal now blocks access to its site from mobile devices – I can’t even log in to use their virtual terminal product to process cards remotely. Sounds like one of those half-baked marketing-fueled ideas which actually limits the amount of potential business Paypal could capture.
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Obopay has launched a much better mobile payment service. Its free to sign up and they give you $5 free when you do. Check it out at http://www.obopay.com
That’s killer! I wonder how long it will be until credit cards are gone the way of the LP and CD. With the launch of the .mobi TLD, there will be plenty more mobile websites popping up!
The MOBI domain names will definately add to the internet! Maybe I’ll put my moving company estimates on a .mobi!