PayPal ups mobile payments estimates as Google continues push into space

The mobile payments space is heating up as PayPal’s owner, eBay, ups its estimates for total mobile payments volumes for the year, and Google’s Wallet service rolls out across more merchants in the US. eBay CEO John Donahoe says that the volume of payments will now top USD3.5bn in 2011, up from a previous forecast of USD3bn. The revisions come as eBay is set to report its Q3 earnings this week, and PayPal pushes a raft of new mobile tools to link online and offline retail.

As PayPal seeks to imitate its foothold in online payments offline, Google is rolling out its mobile wallet app to work across more partner retailers, along with a new feature dubbed SingleTap, which enables users to pay for items, redeem coupons or earn rewards points in a single touch of their phone. Google has also updated the discounts section of its app, now called ˜Featured Offers’, to include deals exclusive to the firm, while users can also add loyalty cards from more retailers to the wallet.”It’s still early days for Google Wallet, but this is an important step in expanding the ecosystem of participating merchants to make shopping faster and easier in more place,” says Google.

Despite its push into payments, Google is likely to have a tough time dislodging PayPal, which remains the most popular online payments brand and has taken a holistic approach to expanding its payments platform, offering mobile payments, loyalty programmes and location-based deals.  eBay’s X.commerce will additionally allow developers to create features such as shopping carts, payment services or inventory management for merchants online. However, unlike Google, PayPal is focusing less on the wave-and-pay technology, stating that near-field communication technology adoption in the mass market is still years away.

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