Paypal faces a crowded fray in mobile payments (infographic)

Paypal faces a crowded fray in mobile payments (infographic):

PayPal announced today that it would be entering the mobile payment market with its own smartphone dongle, PayPal Here.
It’s a triangular widget that plugs into the headphone jack of your phone, just like its prominent startup competitor, Square.
PayPal’s entrance into this market is no surprise, but the Dunder Mifflin-like nature of today’s press conference was a little awkward. Still, as VentureBeat contributor Rocky Agrawal explains, PayPal Here is a credible competitor to Square.
But it’s a crowded market full of challenges. Indeed, there are many ways of taking your money on the go already:

• wireless point-of-sale systems like Paypal Here and Square (you swipe your card through a card reader attached to the merchant’s smartphone or tablet),
• contactless payment systems like Google Wallet and Isis (your smartphone becomes your wallet, and you tap it on the merchant’s reader), and
• carrier billing solutions like Zong (you give the merchant your phone number and the charge appears on your cell phone bill)
• online wallets like Paypal, Google Checkout, and Amazon Payments (you pay for stuff by clicking on a button on a website)

Check out this infographic from Visual.ly for an explanation of each of these approaches to mobile payments.



Filed under: mobile