PayPal Launches Mobile Payments

PayPal today introduced PayPal Mobile, a text message-based service allowing consumers in the US and Canada to send money anytime, from anywhere, using their mobile telephones.

With PayPal Mobile, users can send money, purchase items or donate to charities from their mobile devices. Using PayPal Mobile’s Text to Buy service, consumers can buy things instantly, such as CDs, DVDs, shoes and apparel, by sending product codes via text message. Already, companies like 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, Bravo, MTV, and the NBA Store are offering items for purchase with Text to Buy. PayPal Mobile also enables users to Text to Give to charities such as Amnesty International, Starlight Starbright and UNICEF.

“With the overwhelming popularity of mobile phones, the time has never been better for the merging of ecommerce and wireless devices,” said PayPal President Jeff Jordan. “PayPal already has more than 100 million accounts worldwide, and our customers have already entrusted their personal and financial information to PayPal. Now, making payments is as easy as sending a text message anytime, from anywhere for the millions of customers that prefer to use PayPal.”

To use PayPal Mobile, customers first activate their telephones by logging into their PayPal accounts at https://www.paypal.com/mobile. After registering their mobile telephone numbers, users must choose a secure Personal Identification Number (PIN) which protects every mobile payment.

PayPal Mobile users make payments by sending a text message to PayPal. PayPal calls the user back to confirm the mobile payment, and then sends the money to the recipient. In the case of a Text to Buy purchase, after the merchant receives the payment, the item is shipped to the address already saved in the user’s PayPal account.

Every PayPal Mobile payment is PIN-protected and backed by PayPal’s state-of-the-art fraud prevention system. With PayPal Mobile, financial information is never shared with the recipient. Each user’s financial information is stored on PayPal’s secure servers, not on the mobile telephone, so even if the telephone is lost or stolen, the user’s PayPal account remains secure.

PayPal President Jeff Jordan will demonstrate the PayPal Mobile functionality and discuss mobile commerce during the opening keynote address today at 9:30 a.m., at the CTIA Wireless 2006 conference in Las Vegas.

For more information about PayPal Mobile, visit https://www.paypal.com/mobile.