Today we saw the introduction of PayPal here, the companies latest and greatest way of paying for items or charging items on mobile devices. While it may seem like you’ve seen this before, PayPal has hit all the right notes and its new and updated applications reflect just that.
PayPal Here may be the real announcement today but the existing PayPal Mobile application has been updated as well to provide a seamless experience between the two applications. That said, unless you’re both a merchant and consumer, you’ll likely only use one of these applications but they nonetheless come with some great new features.
On the merchant side of things, PayPal Here makes it incredibly easy to charge for items. The application itself is broken into two setups. Item based charging and a simplified version. To keep track of inventory and other things, a merchant can create an item and add in the price and a picture for the item. This can be done as many times as needed to get your inventory in the app, and when it’s time to charge something, you simply tap on the item, and it will be added to the total purchase. The application pretty much acts like a register. Only better.
Better yet, PayPal Here can take just about any form of payment you can think of. Along with the option to pay with PayPal and the dedicated card reader (that’s encrypted at a hardware level and has a small plastic lock to ensure a clean swipe), PayPal here accepts cash, checks (snap a picture), and invoices as well. While you’re not going to shove cash into the phone, a cash payment made would just help for bookkeeping, allowing the merchant to take care of it right then and there.
Merchants can easily add discounts to a client and when swiping a card, the customer can easily add a tip when signing for the purchased item.
The simplified version of PayPal here is straight forward, as you might expect, and just provides a simple keypad to charge for items that are usually always varying in price. The example used for the simplified version was a cab driver having to charge multiple prices a day. You can charge clients with the same methods as the item-based version within the app.
As far as the consumer side goes, PayPal Mobile has received a facelift. To better benefit the usefulness of PayPal Here, customers can walk into a store and check-in to store and leave their phones in their pockets going forward. Once checked-in, the person will show up in the application for the merchant’s store. When it’s time to pay, the customer simply tells the cashier that they want to pay with PayPal, where the cashier will then find the customer in the app, tap, charge, and the transaction is completed.
PayPal here is now available in the Apple App Store and coming to the Google Play Store very soon.
To learn more, head over to the PayPal Here site here