From “select users” to “millions of merchants,” Venmo is about to make some serious strides into e-commerce.
PayPal announced yesterday that it will fully roll out the Pay with Venmo feature to PayPal merchants, said CEO Dan Schulman:
PayPal made Venmo available as a payment option on the Braintree platform. We have had the opportunity to test and learn, and have preserved the unique nature of Venmo, as we move the experience into new context.
Today we are announcing the opening of our beta for select U.S. PayPal merchants to accept Venmo as a mobile payment option. We anticipate the ability to pay with Venmo will be widely deployed across millions of our U.S. PayPal merchant base by the end of this year.
Select merchants can already enable Venmo as a payment method, with no additional integration required on their end, Schulman said during the company’s earnings call yesterday.
Bank Innovation first reported on the Pay with Venmo feature back in 2014. The service is similar to the existing Pay with Paypal feature, except it specifically targets the e-commerce market in the key 18-35 demographic. It apparently replaces the similar functionality of Venmo Touch. PayPal first rolled out the feature to its customers last year, allowing them to use Pay with Venmo in participating iOS apps. Now it seems that this app-base is about to expand significantly.
For the quarter, Venmo showed exceptional growth, once again, hitting $6.8 billion in total transactions–more than double the $3.2 billion number a year ago.
And unsurprisingly so: despite the Zelles of the banking world, about 68% of millennials said Venmo is their payments app of choice, according to a recent study by LendEDU.
As for the parent PayPal, the company hit a new milestone, surpassing 200 million users in 1Q. The payments giant also processed 1.7 trillion transactions during the quarter, up 23% from a year ago.