PayPal’s One Touch Just Touched A Bunch More Merchants

PayPal’s One Touch Platform just reached out and touched a whole bunch more consumers and merchants – worldwide.

The platform that was introduced about a year ago to eliminate the stutter step between the merchant and PayPal’s checkout page is now available to all U.S. consumers and expanding into 13 new markets, PayPal’s Global Head of Merchant and Next-Generation Commerce Bill Ready told PYMNTS shortly before the announcement.

Countries in which One Touch is now available include Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. As has been the case for all merchants worldwide, merchants in the now-enabled countries won’t have to do anything to upgrade to One Touch — the integration is automatic.

“The One Touch consumer experience is actually ‘no touch’ on the part of the merchant,” Ready noted. “If merchants have already integrated with PayPal then we can upgrade them without them having to do any technical work on their part.”

[bctt tweet=”“The One Touch consumer experience is actually ‘no touch’ on the part of the merchant,” “]

And vice versa.

Ready noted that for consumers with PayPal accounts that are One Touch enabled, the service allows checkout in a way that is exactly as it sounds – checkout with a single click without the need to enter a password, or enter additional information on a PayPal page. The user is verified by their device and able to seamlessly conduct their commerce (after the first time they complete a checkout on that device).

“Half of all eCommerce transactions start on mobile devices,” Ready noted. “But they aren’t ending there – two-thirds to three-quarters of consumers will abandon their carts if the checkout process requires changing screens, or typing in payment data, or trying to recall a password. One Touch bypasses all of that and just allows the transaction to happen.”

Which translates into the one word that is music to the ears of merchants: conversions. With the expansion of One Touch today, that can mean conversion for a lot of very recognizable retailers.

“We have more than half the Internet Retailer 500 largest retailers with One Touch enabled,” Ready remarked. “And merchants that have enabled One Touch have already seen a 50 percent improvement on mobile – which is pretty unheard of in payments.”

New retailers to the lineup include Overstock.com, Eat24, GrubHub, The Home Depot, Vimeo, Priceline, Hotels.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, Southwest, Delta, US Airways/American Airlines, JetBlue and United Airlines.

(And we can also say because we, at PYMNTS, have tried and used it successfully, Saks Fifth Avenue and J Crew.)

One Touch is just about a year old, so relatively new for PayPal, but one that PayPal is focused on rolling out and scaling up as quickly as possible. Ready told PYMNTS that, even though millions of consumers all over the world have used One Touch, they are still scratching the surface.

“Going forward, consumers are going to demand more seamless buying experiences,” Ready said. “We can bridge that gap, create better buying experiences with mobile and at the same time help merchants develop better relationships with our consumers.”

And those customers, according to Ready, like the One Touch experience and describe it in a way that reminded him of how early Uber users responded to just being able to get out of a car at the end of cab ride without doing anything other than closing the car door.

“People can’t believe it is that easy. Not only can a consumer avoid having to enter the payment information, they don’t have to enter in anything else to authenticate them – the device does,” he said. “I really look forward to a few years from now when people expect these seamless buying experiences for everything they do wherever they are shopping.”

[bctt tweet=”I really look forward to a few years from now when people expect these seamless buying experiences for everything when they are shopping.””]

The “winners” in the mobile payments arena will be those who can solve a big problem for a consumer and a merchant. Ready says that problem today, in a digital world, is keeping the checkout experience simple and fast – easy and fast for consumers to use and simple and fast for merchants to enable, with results measured in converted sales to that merchant. Ready believes that One Touch is a platform that does both.

“PayPal really has the entire network online globally in the way that no one else in the business does,” Ready said. “lt’s the only player that has deep relationships with the consumer, and the deep connections to merchants. It’s really that scale which can make the difference.”