PayPal teams with Orderbird to expand presence in Germany

PayPal has become an aggressive force in the mobile payments arena. The company has been establishing a strong presence in several mobile markets around the world and has become one of the most accessible mobile payment platforms because it is not based solely on NFC technology. PayPal has launched a new service in Germany that is meant to further bolster its presence in the European mobile sector. This service was launched with the help of Orderbird, a startup mobile commerce firm based in Germany.

Service aims to put a new twist on commerce

The new service is called PayPal CheckIn and it is designed to create a more personalized shopping experience for consumers. Using the service, a consumer can build a profile like they would on a conventional social networking site. This profile is activated when a person enters into a store that is using the PayPal CheckIn service. This is a form of geo-location that is similar to social networks like Foursquare and Facebook. Using the profile associated with the service allows consumers to shop for products they may be interested in based on their shopping history.

Orderbird customers show interest in PayPal services

Orderbird notes that the service will initially be trialed among a small number of businesses, mostly cafes and small retail outlets located in Berlin, Germany. Some 1,700 merchants throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are using Orderbird’s services currently, and these merchants have been showing interest from the new mobile payments platform being offered by PayPal.

PayPal continues to pursue mobile commerce

PayPal already has several mobile commerce ventures it is invested in, with the most prominent being Beacon. The company has managed to attract a great deal of support from consumers looking to engage in mobile commerce but cannot easily do so because of a lack of NFC-enabled device. PayPal has opted to avoid using NFC technology for its mobile commerce ventures in order to make them much more inclusive to the general population.

Smartphones and tablets made up 37 percent of the traffic on shopping sites that day.

After a powerful push made over Thanksgiving, online spending and sales on Black Friday increased by 9 percent when compared to the same day last year, and 37 percent of that traffic came from holiday mobile commerce users.

The Benchmark real time reporting unit at IBM has released its data from that day.

The data covered 800 online retailers and took millions of different transactions into account. It examined the trends regarding online purchasing, including the holiday mobile commerce sales. When compared to 2012, all of the numbers were looking quite good, having increased over their previous figures. The average order value that was experienced on that date, for example, was $142.33. This was very promising for retailers who saw an average order value of $127.59 online on Thanksgiving, just a day before.

Holiday mobile commerce sales are playing an ever increasing role in those totals.

The shopping that has been occurring over smartphones and tablets has been steadily rising over the last year. This was made quite clear on Black Friday, when 37 percent of all online traffic came from these devices. When compared to the same date in 2012, this was an increase of a full percentage point. The sales that were made over these devices also remained strong, having represented 21 percent of all online sales.

Smartphones were much bigger players in online shopping than tablets, this year. They drove 24.5 percent of all of the traffic online, which was just a sliver over twice the contribution of tablets. Those latter gadgets drove 12.2 percent of the traffic. This makes it clear that at the moment smartphones are clearly the browsing device that people enjoy the most in the mobile sphere.

Equally, tablets owners made notably larger orders than smartphone owners. The average purchase made over a tablet came to $137.55. On the other hand, the average smartphone based holiday mobile commerce order came to $118.33. This indicates that shoppers will purchase more items or larger ticket items when they are working with a larger screen.