The massive online marketplace has ambitious intentions for testing the use of its services.
eBay has now announced its intentions to put considerable testing into place in order to measure the behaviors of consumers who use its mobile payments services while they are in stores and restaurants throughout 2013.
This is because its plans include the doubling of the current size of its PayPal business.
According to the chief executive of eBay, John Donahoe, “Mobile is becoming the new normal.” He discussed a new partnership that the company has just formed with NCR, the in-store transaction hardware manufacturer. This should allow customers at restaurants to use mobile payments in order to pay for their meals by way of their smartphones.
With these mobile payments, the servers never need to bring the check to the table.
These mobile payments services, through PayPal, have already been implemented in certain limited locations. For example, consumers can already use their smartphones to pay for purchases at the smoothie chain, Jamba Juice. This allows the beverage to be pre-ordered and purchased from the phone, and then it can be picked up without ever having to wait in line.
Donahoe explained that “If we get one per cent of offline retail, it doubles the size of PayPal.” He added that “We think this is an enormous white space and we’ll go after it aggressively.” eBay has already experienced considerable benefits from the surge in mcommerce that occurred over the holiday season. This allowed the company to generate results that were even better than they had anticipated for the fourth quarter of 2012.
Growing numbers of people were purchasing their gifts using their smartphones, including mobile payments to complete the transactions for the products. This brought eBay’s revenues up to $3.99 billion for that quarter, alone. This was an increase of 18 percent year over year.
Moreover, under accounting regulations, eBay recorded a loss of 62 percent for the fourth quarter as a result of the impact of the sale of rest of the stake at Skype to Microsoft, at the end of 2011. By using these measure’s, the company’s net income was officially registered at being $751, in comparison with having been $1.98 in 2011.
This year, the major project – or at least one of them – will be mobile payments for the company. A venture that they are hoping will skyrocket the income once more.
