EXCLUSIVE – The latest in PayPal’s busy week: the payments company is now letting users create an invoice through the Facebook Messenger service, expanding on its recent partnership with the social media platform to enable P2P payments through Facebook’s chat service.
In a corporate blogpost yesterday afternoon, PayPal announced that it would now let sellers create and send a PayPal invoice to the buyer directly within Facebook Messenger.
Shilpa Dhar, director of product management at PayPal said in the blogpost:
This use of Messenger is just the latest example of how we are exploring and enabling commerce in new contexts — building on the existing work we’ve done to help consumers and businesses use the PayPal platform to send and receive payments through other Facebook experiences.
To create an invoice, a user needs to open the extension tray in Facebook Messenger, select PayPal and follow steps to fill out information on item name, description, price, and quantity (all that will be appear in an invoice template once completed). The user can also add an image,. Once completed, they can send it to the buyer through Messenger. In turn, when the buyer receives the invoice, they can click on the “Pay with PayPal” that appears in the conversation and using PayPal One Touch, they can make the payment.
This new feature, in time for the shopping season, “is focused on helping merchants and consumers connect across a range of contexts including these new, emerging arenas,” according to PayPal’s post.
The feature is an extension on a recent partnership PayPal and Facebook announced last month, enabling Facebook Messengers users to carry out P2P transactions within the messenger platform. Indeed, the move opens the San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal to an audience nearly five times its 218 million userbase. Facebook Messenger has more than 1.2 billion users.
Aside from Facebook, PayPal has indeed had an eventful week. Two days ago, it announced a partnership with investing platform Acorns, enabling users to link their PayPal and Acorns accounts so that they can set up investment payments via PayPal. The partnership also lets users monitor their Acorns account, among other PFM-type features.
And then last Friday, it announced that it would sell its consumer loan portfolio, worth $5.8 Billion, to Stamford, Conn-based Synchrony Financial. PayPal did not say what it intends to do with proceeds from the sale.
To learn more about the latest developments in P2P payments and mobile banking, join us on March 5-6, 2018 at the Parc 55 in San Francisco for Bank Innovation 2018. Click here to register.