The online-payment options have been widened on the world’s most popular social networking site, Facebook.
Facebook Messenger was previously supporting purchases and payments of products by debit card and credit card transactions.Now, the social networking giant had added PayPal as an additional payment partner. The users will have to link their Facebook accounts with their PayPal accounts and can make payments via a chatbot.
There is another new feature that has been introduced to the PayPal users who are based in the US. This new option allows the customers to directly receive the payment notifications as receipts and other payment details within their Messenger app. With this notifications feature, the customers can manage their transaction receipts including the information regarding order confirmation, total payment made, and shipping address, all in one place.
Even PayPal has been working hard to expand its reach in the consumer realm and has already struck gold in the past few months by partnering with Visa, MasterCard, Claro, Alibaba,Telcel, and Vodafone to name a few companies. By having the Facebook Messenger on board now, PayPal has opened up potentially to almost 1 billion global users. This is not the first time that PayPal has partnered with a messaging service. Last year, Blackberry Messenger had received the payment service from PayPal across all its platforms.
Messenger as an e-Commerce Platform
Facebook has been pushing its Messenger to become a full-fledged commercial business, and its ability to make payments and receive transactions is just a small step towards this huge process. Last year, Facebook had first expanded its Messenger from being just a messaging app into an e-commerce platform, which allowed the businesses to connect directly with the customers. Many big brands including Tommy Hilfiger, Everlane, KLM, Zulily, and many more companies were among the first few businesses to have been signed up for embracing the commercial platform of Messenger. PayPal is just another new option now available at the table. It is ironical that Messenger is adding support for online payments through PayPal instead of Venmo, which is a popular transaction app owned by PayPal.
Facebook has always been open about its desire to push its Messenger towards becoming a commerce tool. The Vice President of Messenger had revealed last month that with more than 30,000 bots, Facebook Messenger is now capable of accepting payments directly from the customers. He also mentioned that Facebook is looking forward to working with many payment companies to expand its reach, including PayPal. The social networking giant is exploiting many payment options for its Messenger app so that it will pave more ways for businesses and merchants to cater to the customers. Apart from PayPal, the social media giant is working on building relations with other payment companies like Stripe, MasterCard, American Express, and Visa to enable its users to make payments via the Messenger app.
Partnering PayPal
The Chief Operating officer at PayPal has confirmed this new commerce paradigm in the company’s blog post that the businesses and merchants can now accept PayPal payments from customers directly in their bots. The officer at PayPal said that this collaboration proves that they are working towards becoming the customer champion. He also mentioned that the payment company will continue to work towards offering PayPal in more places of online shopping via in-store and in-app partnering, with a desire to make mobile commerce and online shopping smarter, simpler, more secure, and beneficial for both the merchants and consumers. Additionally, the partnership of PayPal with Facebook with regard to e-commerce will help many merchants to sell their products directly to the customers from the Shop section from within the Facebook pages.
Previously in 2015, Facebook and PayPal had worked together with its payment company’s subsidiary Braintree, which had helped in powering a partnership in between Uber and Facebook, allowing the users to hail rides by using their Messenger app and make direct payments via Messenger itself. The businesses have been paying through PayPal in past few years for placing ads on Facebook.
This option will be first introduced to a small number of users in the United States. There is no information about when the feature will be arriving at the other countries.