Home Depot offers PayPal POS payment in stores

The Home Depot now accepts PayPal payments in store. (Photo Credit: CC BY-SA/Joshua Dorkin/Flickr)

Home Depot has become the first major retailer to allow customers for pay for their purchases via PayPal mobile point-of-sale.

Maxed your credit card? No problem

When credit cards and debit cards aren’t an option for your in-store Home Depot purchase, PayPal has expanded the game. By entering a cellphone number and PIN into a POS terminal, similar to a debit or credit card machine, PayPal customers can pay for that power sander or touch-up paint in the blink of an eye. Currently, the PayPal mobile POS is only available at five Home Depot stores, but company representatives expect it to take off very soon.

[Learn more about safe ways to use your credit card]

PayPal and Home Depot’s pilot POS project is intended to introduce “one-stop shop” solutions to merchants. As the trend toward mobile payments expands – and the proliferation of smartphones and tablets increases – PayPal expects more merchants to come on board. It will serve as a natural extension of the online payment service PayPal provides to eBay, the online auction giant. Currently, PayPal claims to have 103 million active accounts across 190 markets that accept transactions in 25 different currencies.

“We believe a full Home Depot roll out would increase PayPal’s addressable market by more than 35 percent over night,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at Los Angeles-based investment firm Wedbush. “Although penetration would start at zero, we believe that by adding value to consumers and merchants, PayPal may eventually approach penetration rates comparable to its online presence.”

HomeDepot.com a friend to PayPal

While the PayPal mobile POS is very new and only in a few Home Depot locations, HomeDepot.com has accepted payments via PayPal since December 2010, according to the company’s blog. The Home Depot has more than 2,200 retail stores across the United States, Canada, Mexico and China, so the PayPal POS venture could mean big things for the payment company’s business.

Demonstration of Paypal Mobile POS

Sources

Bankrate

Bloomberg Businessweek

Reuters

Wedbush: http://www.wedbush.com/

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