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eBay sets ambitious goal for 2015: $300B in transactions

E-commerce site eBay looks to be moving into high gear.

CEO John Donahoe announced today that by 2015, he expects the company to be handling $300 billion in transactions per year, according to The Wall Street Journal, nearly twice what it did in 2012. That means, for 2015, between $21.5 billion and $23.5 billion in revenue from both eBay and its payments processing unit PayPal. In 2012, the company earned $14 billion in revenue.

According to the Journal, the company also plans to double the number of active users on its site over the next two years -- … Read more

Visa chief: Fee on digital wallets seems 'appropriate'

Digital wallet operators, like Google, PayPal, and others, should be charged a fee for offering such a service, according to Visa CEO Charlie Scharf.

Speaking at the Barclays Emerging Payments Forum yesterday, Scharf said "it is totally appropriate" for credit card companies to charge digital wallet operators a fee on all transactions, according to Reuters, which was in attendance.

Scharf's comments come after eBay revealed in a February regulatory filing that MasterCard was planning to charge it a fee for its digital wallet service starting in June. The actual amount PayPal pays isn't expected to be … Read more

PayPal co-founder Levchin launches e-commerce startup

PayPal co-founder Max Levchin is bringing his e-commerce business smarts to a mobile-payments startup he's launching called Affirm, according to AllThingsD.

What's different about Affirm from other mobile-payment companies, like Square and Stripe, is that it's goal is to make payments happen with as few clicks as possible -- similar to how buying something on a desktop computer works.

"We are trying to get as close as possible to one-click, which has always been the case on the desktop," Levchin told AllThingsD. "In mobile, it has become an imperative to be able to buy … Read more

PayPal readies launch of mobile payments system in Europe

PayPal unveiled new hardware today that will allow it to take its in-person mobile payment system to Europe, expanding the lead it has in the international market on rival Square.

PayPal Here, which launched last March in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong, will debut in the U.K. this summer for its first foray into the European market. The eBay-owned payments processor plans to eventually offer the service to other countries on the continent.

About the size of a smartphone, the payments processor's new gadget will accept credit and debit cards under the Chip and PIN … Read more

Girl Scouts: No brownie points for PayPal-using cookie seller

I am always suspicious when people say they care.

Somehow, my first reaction is: "How much?"

So I feel more than a pang of sympathy for 11-year-old Emma Vermaak.

She is not the only 11-year-old to like One Direction. However, she might be the first 11-year-old who thought to use modern methods to raise money as part of the Girl Scouts' "I Care" program so troops overseas could enjoy Girl Scout cookies.

Inspired in her quest, she thought it might be an idea to use PayPal. This system is not revolutionary. It feels like it's been around since Jimmy Carter's time. Yet the Girl Scouts organization seems not to be quite a pal of it.… Read more

Study: People don't use or understand digital wallets

The digital wallet has been anointed by many as the future of payments. In the present, however, virtual-pay apps remain largely untouched and misunderstood.

Only 51 percent of U.S. consumers are even aware of digital payment providers other than PayPal, and a teeny-tiny percentage of people -- 12 percent spanning all brands -- have actually used applications such as Google Wallet, MasterCard PayPass Wallet, or Square Wallet, according to a new study from analytics firm ComScore.

ComScore analyzed data from a panel of 1 million U.S. consumers and two separate surveys of U.S. Internet users in November … Read more

PayPal hit by outages and other glitches today

PayPal is suffering from site issues today, according to its U.K. Twitter feed, and is striving to fix them:

We've been made aware of site issues today & are working to get this resolved. Apologies for any inconvenience. Will update asap. Tks, MW

Downrightnow.com, which tracks the online availability of different sites, has recorded a string of outages for PayPal today. As of around 8:30 a.m. PT, PayPal had been up for the previous 30 minutes or so. But the site had previously been down for one long stretch and several shorter stretches starting early … Read more

PayPal's in-store payment partners grow to 23 retailers

Increasingly bringing its service offline, PayPal announced today that it has nearly doubled its brick-and-mortar store lineup to 23 retailers that now accept its payment service.

"Delivering valuable digital and mobile payments is alive and thriving, and consumers all over the U.S. will now start seeing PayPal more where they shop every day, including the grocery store and at the gas pump," PayPal's vice president of retail services Don Kingsborough said in a statement. "No bells, whistles or buzzes -- just technology that works and gets the most from your money."

Throughout the U.… Read more

The social 'gifting' boom: Wrapp now sending 1M cards a week

A handful of players -- one of them named Facebook -- have worked hard over the past year to create a new category of business known as social gifting. Facebook saw enough opportunity that last spring it snapped up a startup called Karma and built what became Facebook Gifts -- a way for any of Facebook's billion-plus users to send a gift a friend, whether it's a bottle of wine, an iTunes gift card or an item of clothing.

Square, meantime, added gift cards this month to Square Wallet to help its battle with PayPal. And a … Read more