Tag: ebay mobile payments

eBay mobile payments app finds success with young adults

| May 7, 2014

New payments application is helping eBay become more appealing in the mobile space

Leading online retailer eBay has been putting more focus on the mobile sector in recent years. Much of the company’s efforts in the mobile field are being handled by PayPal, but eBay has also been flexing its own proverbial muscles in the mobile space, hoping to promote mobile payments among young adults. eBay’s Venmo peer-to-peer payments application has seen strong growth recently among this demographic, which suggests that the company’s efforts may be paying off.

Venmo finds success among college students thanks to its social networking features

Venmo has become quite popular with young adults on college campuses. Many people are using this application to settle debts among one another or split the cost of meals at restaurants. The application is designed more like a social network than a typical payment processor. Venmo boasts of a news feed that tracks transactions that users want to share publicly, but does not show the actual amount being paid. Users can interact with one another in a manner resembling Twitter while also seeing what their friends are purchasing and what they have to say about those products.

Voyeurism helps boost the attraction of eBay’s mobile application

eBay - Mobile PaymentsSocial network voyeurism is nothing new. It is quite common for people to browse the social feeds of their friends to see what they are doing on a daily basis. Indeed, this is one of the primary reason social networks are so popular. eBay claims that this voyeurism is what makes the Venmo application so popular among young consumers as it reinforces the application’s network effect.

Venmo will have to compete with other mobile payments platforms in order to become a success

Venmo is still relatively new to the mobile payments field. Though the application has managed to find a degree of success, it still must compete with other, more popular platforms before it can be considered a competitive mobile commerce platform. Both Google and Square currently represent some of eBay’s most challenging competition in the mobile field and these two companies will not be easily beaten.

Mobile payments help eBay transcend commerce

| May 20, 2013

eBay Mobile PaymentsRetailer becomes more than mobile payments and e-commerce

Acclaimed online retailer eBay has established a formidable presence in the mobile commerce sector. The company has been one of the strongest supporters of mobile payments and has made extraordinary efforts to encourage consumers to use their mobile devices to shop online and purchase products. As eBay continues to assimilate mobile payments, the company is beginning to consider itself as something more than a simple retailer: eBay is beginning to envision itself as commerce itself.

Executive suggests that eBay represents commerce itself

The company’s Europe vice president of marketing, Alexander von Schirmeister, recently spoke about the company’s role in the retail sector. According to Schirmeister, eBay has begun to trannscend the boundaries of e-commerce, partly due to the company’s strong focus on the mobile space. Mobile payments have helped eBay break into new markets and engage a new generation of consumers in a more dynamic fashion. According to Schirmeister, eBay “is not m-commerce or e-commerce, it’s commerce period.”

Fluid nature of company makes it accommodating to the needs of consumers

Schirmeister notes that eBay has become capable of adapting to the different ways that people shop and pay for products so effectively that they can no longer be considered a company with a specific focus in terms of commerce. In the past, eBay had only been capable of accommodating the needs of online shoppers that used traditional desktop computers. As mobile technology grew more prominent, however, the company began seeing a transition in the world of commerce and adjusted itself accordingly. This has allowed eBay to put more focus on mobile payments, which are quickly becoming more popular around the world.

Mobile payments can help close the gap between online and offline worlds

Because eBay has begun to see its role in the retail sector evolve, it has been making moves to close the gap between the online and offline worlds. Mobile payments are expected to help significantly in this endeavor, as they allow the retailer to engage mobile consumers in the physical world without severing their ties to the Internet.