SAN FRANCISCO — PayPal, the online-payment processor owned by eBay, introduced a mobile version of its checkout software Tuesday as it tries to capitalize on surging smartphone use.
The company, holding a conference in San Francisco to promote its service to mobile-phone and Web developers, also unveiled a cheaper way for businesses to handle transactions of less than $12, such as a 99-cent digital song or a single newspaper article. As more commerce moves to phones and social networks, PayPal is racing against Visa and MasterCard to earn the loyalty of programmers. Its developers, who began building PayPal applications on smartphones, televisions and websites last year, have generated $1 billion in payment volume for the company. Mobile commerce will grow sixfold to $119 billion by 2015, according to ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y.
“Developers are basically taking PayPal out to places PayPal hasn’t been before,” said Nate Gilmore, vice president of marketing and business development at Shipwire, a Palo Alto, Calif.- based company that helps merchants store and ship products. Bloomberg News
