PayPal now lets you pay online with a fingerprint scan
Mobile shopping just got easier if you’re a PayPal user who also uses Android Pay.
PayPal (PYPL) announced on Wednesday at Google I/O that users may now use Google’s virtual wallet, Android Pay, to pay for purchases made inside their mobile Chrome browser at 16 million participating online merchants, including Walgreens (WBA), Nike (NKE) and Target (TGT).
“Consumers are spending more time on mobile than any other place,” PayPal COO Bill Ready told Yahoo Finance. “However, for commerce shopping, if you don’t have a great mobile payment experience, you’re less likely to spend, and merchants lose out on sales.”
Here’s how it works: Once you’ve finished shopping at an online merchant like, say, Nike.com, and arrived at the website’s checkout page, you’ll automatically receive a notification asking if you’d like to pay with PayPal. If so, press your finger on your Android phone’s fingerprint scanner. And voila: you’ve just paid.
For Android users with PayPal accounts, the news is actually pretty significant, given PayPal has streamlined the online payments process to a simple fingerprint scan. It’s also worth noting that iPhone users who use Apple Pay can do what PayPal is promising Android users once the update rolls out on Wednesday.
Ready promises the transition for merchants will be just as seamless. Merchants who have the most recent software versions of PayPal’s checkout software don’t have to do a thing.
PayPal’s latest news follows on the heels of news this past April, in which the online payments business announced a partnership with Android Pay. Under the partnership, PayPal users can use Google’s virtual wallet to make purchases at millions of brick-and-mortar stores. Last year, PayPal processed 2 billion mobile transactions and $102 billion in mobile payments worldwide.
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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.
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